preview

10 Most Remarkable Posthumously Published Books

Decent Essays

10 Most Remarkable Posthumously Published Books How to deal with an author’s unpublished work after death is a much debated issue. Many famous authors have had their works published after their death, some with their blessings and others against their explicitly stated wishes. Nabokov didn't want The Original of Laura to be released. He had instructed his son Dmitri in his will to destroy the manuscript but Dmitiri wasn't inclined to obey, inciting a debate over which is more important — an author's last wishes or literary posterity. For better or worse, here are ten such remarkable works that have been published after the author has passed on. 10. Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky Died: 1942 Published: 2004 Suite Française is one of the great first-hand novelistic chronicles of life in Nazi occupied France. In July 1942, having just completed the first two of a planned sequence of five novels, Némirovsky was apprehended as "a stateless person of Jewish descent" and deported to Auschwitz, where she died. Her two small daughters escaped, along with the manuscript of Suite Française in a small suitcase. Ironically, her elder daughter, Denise, kept the manuscript for fifty years without reading it, thinking it was a journal, possibly too agonizing to read. In the 1990s, she made arrangements to donate her mother's papers to a French war archive, and decided to check out what her mother had written. She discovered, instead of a diary, two novellas written in a

Get Access