5. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
Publishers rejected this novel when Toole shopped it around. It wasn’t until eleven years after his death that the book became the hallmark of Southern literature, winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1981. (His mom, Thelma, and fellow writer Walker Percy worked to get it published.) Now the famous story of Ignatius J. Reilly and his misadventures in New Orleans is printed in eighteen languages all over the world.

6. Pirate Latitudes, Michael Crichton
The story goes that Crichton’s assistant stumbled upon two manuscripts, one finished and the other partially finished, on Crichton’s computer after his 2008 death. Pirate Latitudes (the finished one), a fictional novel about piracy in seventeenth-century Jamaica, was released in 2009; Steven Spielberg has already agreed to produce a movie version, according to the Washington Post.

7. The Original of Laura, Vladmir Nabokov
Nabokov’s physical and mental health deteriorated a great deal near the end of his life. Displeased with his incomplete novel, he insisted that his wife, Vera, and son, Dmitri, get rid of its evidence once he passed. But neither of them could bear to destroy the famous writer’s last words, so they placed all 138 index cards (Nabokov often used such cards in his writing) in a Swiss bank vault. In 2009, Dmitri published the notes and called it “a novel in fragments.” The main character, Philip, is obsessed with death and what follows afterward. Critics maligned Dmitri’s decision, saying Nabakov was clearly too ill to write as brilliantly as he once had.

8. The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
Anne Frank’s diary, an account of her time spent hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam, is one of the most famous posthumously published books in the world. It relays everything that happened to her during those two years, from the cramped conditions of the attic to the confusion and throes of adolescence. After she died at a concentration camp in 1945, the diary was found and given to the only surviving member of the Frank family, Anne’s father. He published it in 1947, to immediate popularity and praise.

It’s rare that a writer’s work is finished upon his or her death; more often, there are incomplete manuscripts and dilemmas about what to do with them. People presume to know authors’ intentions—or ignore them altogether—and manipulate their last words. Whether those practices are morally right will always be a point of contention. But literature would surely be remiss without some of these last novels. Even the more cringe-worthy ones serve a greater purpose: they remind us just how extraordinary these writers were in their time. As for the ones who achieved notoriety after their time, well, that’s even more extraordinary.

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