Stieg Larsson is one of the hottest writers around right now. In 2008, various book-trade magazines, such as Publisher’s Weekly and the Bookseller, declared him the second-most-popular bookseller globally. His most recent work, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, became the best-selling book of 2010 (to date) in the United States just a couple of weeks after its release. Unfortunately, Larsson never had the chance to enjoy his success; he died in 2004, shortly before any of his completed manuscripts were published.

What to do with an author’s unfinished work after death is a controversial and messy issue within the literary world. Larsson’s case was a rarity: his manuscripts were finished and he wanted to share them. Many famous writers’ last words have been published posthumously, whether that was their desire or not. The outcome can be positive, but in other instances, some things are better left unfinished.

1. The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western, F. Scott Fitzgerald
A few months before his death at age forty-four, Fitzgerald started a novel about a movie producer trying to survive in Hollywood. Edmund Wilson, a literary critic and friend of the writer, put together his unfinished work and published it in 1941. Fitzgerald’s previous book, Tender Is the Night, was a disappointing follow-up to the classic The Great Gatsby, so it seems like even more of a shame that he was never able to properly introduce this novel to the world. The New York Times’s J. Donald Adams wrote in 1941 that it “would have been Fitzgerald’s best novel and a very fine one.”

2. Sleeping Murder, Agatha Christie
After writing the final installment of her Miss Marple detective series, Christie put it in a bank vault for thirty years. When her health deteriorated in the early 1970s, she gave her publishers permission to release it in 1976; she died in January of that year. Fans got to find out what happened to Miss Marple, and the book itself received decent reviews. Even after her death, only Shakespeare and the Bible outsell her impressive collection of published works.

3. The Trial, Franz Kafka
Before the end of his battle with tuberculosis in 1924, Kafka told his literary executor, Max Brod, to burn everything he’d ever written. Thank goodness Brod ignored his wishes, because though Kafka was largely unsuccessful in his time, he became one of the most famous and influential authors in all the literary world after his death. The Trial, a story about a man’s fight against the bureaucracy of law, is one of his most well-known works. Orson Welles developed it into a movie in 1963.

4. True at First Light, Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway’s memoirs describe a trip to East Africa in the 1950s. Patrick, his son, released it in 1999 after editing it down from two hundred thousand words to one hundred thousand. Not surprisingly, critics felt the story lacked many elements, particularly Hemingway’s magic with words. He abandoned it because he had trouble remembering the actual events, so Patrick added fictional details to fill in the blanks—a highly controversial move. Far more successful was A Moveable Feast, released a few years after Hemingway’s 1961 death; his chronicles of his life as a struggling writer in Paris are heartfelt and inspiring.

Health Top Tips Nutrition Love Lifestyle Happiness Weight Loss 

[1] [2] 下一页