Not long ago we discussed several Sherlock Holmes stories you won’t find in any of the versions labeled “Complete”. Even though Leslie Klinger’s Annotated Sherlock Holmes contains the four stories dubbed “The Apocrypha” (which mention an un-named detective in them), neither he nor others include "How Watson Learned the Trick " (from the Queen Victoria Doll-House) or The Field Bazaar (written for a fund raiser) or the Sherlock Holmes plays that Doyle wrote.
Similarly, there are other works by the original authors that are incomplete in some fashion.
Cecil Scott Forester’s “Horatio Hornblower” series – Forester originally wrote three novels that formed a complete trilogy in the 1940s. He then went and started writing short stories in the 1950s and eventually complete other novels in the 1960s. These have been collected into a chronological series, including an extra volume “The Hornblower Companion” (which contains the outline of a never-written Hornblower story) and a collection, “Hornblower During the Crisis”, which contains two short stories and the incomplete title novel (which I suspect he was writing to explain howcum Hornblower wasn’t at the Battle of Trafalgar).
But Forester also wrote four short stories that appeared in magazines, and have since appeared in some collections of sea stories, but have not been collected together in a single volume, as far as I know. Undoubtedly the reason is that they are not compatible with the rest of Hornblower’s history. But he had no problem publishing the 1940s novels and the 1960s novels as parts of the same series, despite sevetal inconsistencies between the two sets.
H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine – Wells wrote several other scenes for this novel that were included in later editions, and some have some scenes but not others. They have finally all been collected into one volume, along with his proto-version of the story, “The Chronic Argonaut”
Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger – Twain actually wrote three versions of this story. Well, most of three versions, anyway. The single complete version most people have read is actually a composite created by Albert Bigelow Paine after Twain’s death. All three versions have been published together in one critical volume.
Speaking of Twain and Paine, it’s interesting that versions of Mark Twain’s Autobiography published before 2010 are actually versions that Paine put together from sections of autobiography that Twain published at different times, and not Twain’s real intended autobiography, which he insisted not be published until a century after his death. There’s also a version cobbled together by Bernard de Voto. But the real Twain autobiography is the massive three-volume edition published between 2010 and 2015 by The Mark Twain Project. It bothered me for a long time that the earlier autobiographies did not fit the description that Twain himself wrote about in the introduction, and it wasn’t until I finally bought and read the first volume of twain’s 2010 autobiography that I understood why.
Incidentally, I notice that I only see copies of the first volume in used-book stores, and have only seen the first volume as an audio book. Evidently most people had their appetite for Twain’s reminiscences satisfied by that first massive volume, and didn’t feel like paying for and reading a second volume of the same size, let alone a third. Since I’m a Twain fanatic, I bought and read all three volumes (in addition to the Paine-edited earlier version).