Authors Bow to Online Mobs, Change Passages in Published Novels

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Cowed by online complaints, two authors agree to withdraw passages from already-published books. The precedent is alarming.

Here’s a bit of a watershed in American publishing: Social-media commenters are now successfully editing already-published books in order to alter the remarks of fictional characters.

It’s unbelievable, yet true: Best-selling writer Elin Hilderbrand, who writes beach books with titles suggesting upper-middle-class-white-lady luxury, was so cowed by a few posts on Instagram complaining about a passage in one of her books that she agreed to strike the language from future editions.

In her latest novel, Golden Girl, one of Hilderbrand’s characters makes a mildly tasteless joke about Anne Frank: Examining an attic where a friend has offered her a place to stay for a summer, “Vivi” says, “You’re suggesting I hide here all summer? Like . . . like Anne Frank?” The omniscient narrator of the book follows up, “This makes them both laugh — but is it really funny, and is Vivi so far off base?”

Anne Frank jokes are hardly a new phenomenon, and as Frank is something like the Jewish equivalent of a saint, she has been the inspiration for outré and ribald humor. In 2019, the Harvard Lampoon published (and later apologized for) a photoshopped image that Kardashianized Frank by joining her face to the body of a bikini model….

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