Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” was almost called something else. Early title contenders were “Fiesta: A Novel” (as the book was subsequently known in England), “Two Lie Together,” and even “For in much wisdom is much grief and he that increases knowledge increases sorrow”—a line that, like the winning candidate, comes from Ecclesiastes, and that, it is safe to assume, Hemingway might have abridged further if he’d used it. The evidence for these alternatives comes from early notes and manuscripts, which are included in a new edition of the novel, published this month.

There are signs of other felicitous decisions. The real-life socialite Lady Duff Twysden was given a better name, Brett Ashley. Maudlin dialogue was struck, as when the ill-starred Brett says to Jake Barnes, the narrator, “I love you and I’ll love you always.” (In the finished text, lines like “Well, let’s shut up about it” are more in the spirit of their unconsummated affair.) And Hemingway settled on a perfect final line. After Brett says, “Oh Jake . . . we could have had such a damned good time together,” the author at first had Jake respond, “It’s nice as hell to think so,” but later scribbled “Isn’t it nice to think so.” By the time the manuscript went to the printer, it had been altered again, to the sharp and sad and perfectly balanced “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Early drafts of the book are well known to scholars, and are available at the Hemingway Collection, at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, in Boston. But this new edition puts them in handy appendices, giving us lay readers a sense of Hemingway’s writing process, and, more importantly, of how different a novel “The Sun Also Rises” might have been.

All of Hemingway’s major changes to his manuscript move it toward a greater simplicity. In early drafts, the novel began in the middle of the story, at the bullfights during the festival of San Fermín, in Pamplona. Later, Hemingway opted for a more straightforward, chronological order, introducing the American expats Jake, Brett, and Robert Cohn in Paris, before they travel to Spain. In the manuscript that he sent to his editor at Scribner, Maxwell Perkins, the first two chapters detailed the characters’ histories and motivations. “This is a novel about a lady,” it began:

Her name is Lady Ashley and when the story begins she is living in Paris and it is Spring. That should be a good setting for a romantic but highly moral story. As everyone knows, Paris is a very romantic place. Spring in Paris is a very happy and romantic time. Autumn in Paris, although very beautiful, might give a note of sadness or melancholy that we shall try to keep out of this story.

It is diverting to consider how the novel would have been different if Brett were indeed the main character and the heroine—if it really were a story about a lady, rather than about the various men who loved her, or couldn’t. But more intriguing still is the second part of the opening, in which Hemingway breaks into the narrative to address the reader directly, and, in so doing, calls out the artifice implicit in the writing and reading of fiction. It is a wink at the marketplace—readers want lively, lighthearted tales from abroad—and alludes to the novel’s central dark, repeated joke: that everything awful in life, in all of its sadness and melancholy, is better laughed at.

Later, in another section that was cut, Hemingway writes:

I did not want to tell this story in the first person, but I find that I must. I wanted to stay well outside of the story so that I would not be touched by it in any way, and handle all the people in it with that irony and pity that are so essential to good writing.

Jake Barnes was named Hem in the early drafts, and in the version he sent to his editor, Hemingway retained the conceit that the book was not merely based on his real-life experiences but was actually a memoir: “I made the unfortunate mistake, for a writer, of first having been Mr. Jake Barnes.”

All of this was cut at the suggestion of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, after reading the version that Hemingway had sent to Perkins, wrote a long, dismayed-sounding letter to Hemingway, in which he said, “I think that there are about 24 sneers, superiorities, and nose-thumbings-at-nothing that mar the whole narrative up to P. 29 where (after a false start on the introduction of Cohn) it really gets going.” Though Hemingway would later downplay Fitzgerald’s editorial influence, the published novel begins with the sentence: “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.”

In the letter, Fitzgerald also criticized Hemingway for injecting his own writerly persona into the text: “That biography from you, who allways believed in the superiority (the preferability) of the imagined to the seen not to say to the merely recounted.” With this fragment of a sentence, Fitzgerald gives Hemingway the familiar writing-class advice—show, don’t tell; less is more; and what is left out can sometimes be more meaningful than what is included. Earlier versions of the novel contained even more of this “biography”; Fitzgerald had caught the remnants of nervous self-consciousness that Hemingway himself had curtailed as he wrote.

There are several striking examples, in the drafts, of this uneasiness. After a digression about a washed-up but popular bullfighter, Hemingway writes: “Well none of that has anything to do with the story and I suppose you think there isn’t any story anyway but it sort of moves along in time and anyway there is a lot of dope about high society in it and that is always interesting.” Later, after describing the habits of his social set: “I don’t know why I have to put all this down. It may mix up the story but I wanted to show you what a fine crowd we were.” These moments, which did not survive the editing process, have a superficial confidence, an edgy bravado, but they are also anxious, the sign of a writer trying to figure out where his voice fits in among those of his characters.