An example of an author who rewrote a published work: Samuel Richardson and his book Clarissa, one of the earliest novels in the english language. I read all eight volumes of it for an undergraduate english paper. Richardson was a publisher, so he had total freedom. He was worried that his readers didn't find his villain villainous enough, so he included footnotes and summaries, all pointing out how rotten the villain was and how nice the heroine was. This had a very weird effect on the story, encasing it, kind of like Snow White's glass coffin. I much prefer Tolkien's one-chapter rewrite in The Hobbit. There actually is a LotR connection: A few years ago this book was done as a series on TV starring Sean Bean as the wicked aristocrat.
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