The Illuminatus! Trilogy

In 1969 Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea were associate editors at Playboy magazine.
Their specific role was as co-editors of the Playboy Forum, a column in the magazine that allowed readers to discuss civil liberties, individual rights and abuses of government power.
As well as many intelligent letters from people concerned by the excesses of authority and infringements of constitutional rights they received a large amount of correspondence concerning government conspiracies and secret societies.
Considering the growing pile of letters they had received the pair posed themselves a question:

‘What if all these nuts are right and every single conspiracy they complain about exists?’

Using this as a starting point they developed the idea for a novel that would contain elements of every conspiracy they had been told about.
The premise for the plot would be that the Discordian Society, an organisation based on the worship of Eris, the Greek goddess of Chaos, was at war with a group called the Bavarian Illuminati which Wilson and Shea had invented, and that this conflict had taken place over the whole of human history.
The Discordian Society had been founded in 1958 and was based on the idea that Chaos is all that truly exists in the world and that ‘order’ and ‘disorder’ are human inventions designed to explain the Chaos around us. Being based around the worship of Chaos there is a great deal of encouragement within the Discordian Society for members to create schisms and form cabals.
Wilson and Shea felt that this propensity for conflict made the Discordian Society an ideal organisation to put in opposition to their invented secret society.
The novel that emerged from this was a true product of the counterculture that Wilson and Shea were a part of. ‘The Illuminatus! Trilogy’ embraced music, drugs, sex, magic, science fiction and satire. The work was initially formed of three separate volumes, ‘The Eye in the Pyramid’, ‘The Golden Apple’ and ‘Leviathan’.
The decision to publish the work in three volumes was taken by the publisher, Dell, but the authors always saw the piece as one continuous narrative.
Another condition that Dell placed on the publication of the book was that the length of the manuscript had to be drastically reduced.
Free from any editorial control and allowing their creativity to run wild, the novel stood at a massive 1,300 pages when first submitted to Dell. The publishers felt that 500 pages could be removed from the story, which would drastically save on the publishing costs, and sent the manuscript back to Wilson and Shea to be reduced.
Soon enough the shorter version was back in the hands of the publisher who went on to publish the individual editions in 1975.
Initially Wilson and Shea joked that the text that had been removed had revealed the true secrets of the Illuminati and that the group had pressured the publishers to not let it see print.
The disjointed nature of the narrative of the book was seen as largely a stylistic choice on the part of the authors and the many narrative dead ends a deliberate embracing of the spirit of Chaos that surrounds the work.
In truth a furious Wilson and Shea, angry at the publishers demands to cut back the manuscript, abandoned any attempts at logical editing and simply pulled chunks of paper out until they were left with the 800 pages required.
Their argument was that if the publishers were buying literature by the pound then that was how they were going to get it...