Greetings, all!
I have a question regarding one of my favorite Bradbury short stories, "The Exiles".

Some years ago, I happened across an anthology of short stories which had all been edited by Anthony Boucher (IIRC). One of them was "The Exiles". The odd part was, this version of the story included a paragraph in which the two main characters (Poe and Bierce?), on their way through the castle, visit Lovecraft as he sits eating ice cream before a raging fire.

This was odd because in every subsequent anthologized version of this story, that paragraph is omitted. Given Bradbury's famous resistance to having well-meaning but ultimately misguided editors deleting things from his work, my suspicion is that this paragraph was added _at the request of_ the editor - Boucher, in this case - and removed later, when Bradbury regained control over the text.

Fond as I am of Lovecraft, and amusing as the paragraph was, I think the story works better without it.

Does anyone know anything more about this (admittedly obscure) detail?

Sincerely,
Robert Walker-Smith

Two ways you could find out would be:

Look at the original magazine version (from Maclean's (Canada), September 15, 1949) and see if it's there. If you can't acquire a copy, ask a collector who has one to look for you.

Check the date of the Boucher anthology vs. the others. Perhaps it was merely a case of a paragraph from the magazine story duplicated in the first anthology in which it appeared, and then being removed--you are correct, probably by Bradbury himself.