I was amazed to learn this tidbit of information. I have always assumed it was an editing decision to leave the prologue off. I couldn't believe a magazine of the stature of the the New Yorker would make this sort of egregious error.
No wonder Annie almost had a stroke!
L
Tell you what, taken at literal face value of the words, "they forgot to typeset it" sounds a little fishy to me. I mean, I don't know how
The New Yorker works now, or how it worked in 1997, but--she didn't get proofs? Jesus H.! Notwithstanding that it's
The New Yorker, I'd have had a stroke if I didn't get proofs. I believe she said what she said, but I'd think maybe an error like this was more likely to happen when the pages of the story were made up.
Folks, I'm not calling Annie Proulx a liar. I am making a technical distinction between setting the text of the story into type and actually arranging--or making up--the contents of the magazine for printing. After spending most of my working life in endeavors connected to writing, editing, and publishing, it seems very weird to me that she would not have been sent a proof, a preliminary copy of the story after it was first set into type, where it would have been hard to miss that the prologue wasn't there.
Or maybe there's just more to the story of the missing prologue that "we" haven't been told.