The cuts were modest and scope-preserving; the "300–500 pages cut" story is a myth — the bigger fact is what was *added* after 1993

In plain terms: the cuts to the manuscript were modest and scope-preserving -- the "300 to 500 pages cut" story is a myth -- and the bigger fact is how much was added after 1993.

Where the text lands: this is a question about how the book was made, not what the finished text says, so the text-support scale does not apply; on the documentary record it is strongly supported. Among readers: a telling inversion -- scope-preserving cuts are agreed among the people who actually saw the manuscript, while the big-cut myth remains the majority belief in mainstream reception.

The draft witness puts the cuts near 40 pages against 200-plus pages added in 1994-95, and the editor's actual December 1994 letter -- now in the archive -- shows a maximum ask of 46 per-scene questions, most of which Wallace refused. The legend's biggest number turns out to be Wallace's own: on the 1996 tour tapes he put the book at about five hundred pages longer, four hundred of which needed to go -- the very figure his editor later called a great exaggeration -- so the myth reads as author-seeded tour talk, most plausibly counting manuscript pages rather than book pages. Drawn from the composition tested reading.