The strange case of posthumously published books

Pay off the debts (published on September 3, 2024) first caught my attention because of Kraus. I had just read and was thrilled Whalefalland I was ready to read everything else he wrote. But the author’s introduction to this book – by Kraus, of course – got me thinking.

As Kraus tells it, he came across Romero’s half-finished novel in 2019 while browsing through the George A. Romero Archival Collection at the University of Pittsburgh. He was the first person other than library staff to be given access to the collection, and the intention was for him to help the library publicize the collection. But then he found 384 pages of this unfinished novel. As Kraus read the pages, he felt Romero had taken great joy in writing them.

There were no notes on the project, but Kraus also suspected that Romero had a plan for the book. He speculated that the introduction was one of the last things Romero wrote before his death. After some thought, Kraus firmly believed that publishing the book would show the world what Romero was truly capable of, aside from the zombies he was known for.

Meanwhile, I wondered: What would George Romero think? Would he want his unfinished work completed and printed by another author? How could one be sure that the finished book would be true to his original vision? How would he feel about having his name associated with a book that he could not complete to his own satisfaction?

Interesting, Pay off the debts is not the first novel by Romero that Kraus has completed. After Romero’s death in 2017, his manager contacted Kraus about completing The living Dead, a manuscript Romero had been working on until he was diagnosed with lung cancer.

“As much as I worked to develop the book in the spirit of George Romero,” Kraus said in an interview for Film International, “the harsh reality was that my job was not to simply glue the seams together. Much of the book had to come from my own imagination,” he admitted, “and for that reason it has to be read as a Romero/Kraus book, not strictly a Romero book. To portray it otherwise would be dishonest.”

Posthumously published books are nothing new. I myself have lost myself in titles such as The Bright Hour by Nina Riggs and When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, both of which were written knowing they would have to be published posthumously. I enjoyed it very much I will disappear into the darkness by Michelle McNamara, the first true crime book I ever read. At the time of the author’s death, the book was only two-thirds finished. It was later completed by crime writer Paul Haynes, investigative journalist Bill Jensen, and McNamara’s widow, comedian Patton Oswalt. What does the world miss when a beloved author’s work is left unfinished? Does the potential loss justify the risk that the finished product is not what it could have been?

What does it mean when an author’s work is released into the world without his or her consent?

Emily Dickinson’s entire work came to us in much the same way. After her death, Dickinson told her sister Lavinia to destroy her work. Instead, Lavinia published her collected poems four years after her death in 1890. Dickinson was one of my favorite poets as I grew up, finding myself as a writer and copying my own terrible poems. But I can’t help but be angry about her.

And what about Anaïs Nins Delta of Venus? Nin did not necessarily leave instructions for the destruction of her works, but this particular collection of erotic novels was commissioned by a private collector. Shouldn’t it have remained private?

These incidents seem particularly egregious. But what about the cases where no instructions were left?

But the thought that someone could potentially edit my work and turn it into a Frankenstein monster that somehow finds its way into publication and still bears my name? Terrifying!

(Yes, I also realize that I’m not important enough for anyone to feel compelled to do this.)

There are many cases of posthumously published works where changes were made that were never approved by the original author, or where unedited works were published that were previously considered too messy for publication.

An example is Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. The collection of poems was first published in 1965, two years after her death by suicide. When Plath took her own life, she was still married to Ted Hughes, although they were living apart. For this reason, he inherited her literary estate and eventually took it upon himself to make significant changes Arielchanged the original order of the poems, deleting some of them entirely and adding others. The problematic nature of their relationship only makes me more skeptical that Hughes had Plath’s best interests in mind.

Another example is “Juneteenth” by Ralph Ellison. Apparently struggling with writer’s block, Ellison had more than 2,000 pages of material for the book when he died in 1994 at the age of 80. These pages were not yet in their final form. In 1999, it was edited by John F. Callahan and published at only 354 pages. A more complete version – at 1,101 pages – was published in 2010 under the title Three days before the shooting.

The painter Emma Reyes wrote about her life in a collection of letters at the suggestion of the historian Germán Arciniegas. She had initially refused to write down her story. She was illiterate until her teenage years and her writing seemed untrained. Nevertheless The book by Emma Reyes was published in Colombia in 2012, five years after her death, and later translated into English.

And when Ernest Hemingway’s novel True at first sight 38 years after his death, Joan Didion dismissed it as a marketing/money game. She wrote in The New Yorker“You either pay attention to the punctuation or you don’t, and Hemingway did. You either pay attention to the ‘and’ and the ‘but’ or you don’t, and Hemingway did. You either believe something is in a condition suitable for publication or you don’t, and Hemingway didn’t.”

Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon, for example, was not published until after her death because she was unable to find a publisher during her lifetime. The book was based on her 1927 interviews with Oluale Kossola (also known as Cudjoe Lewis), who was believed to be the last survivor of the Middle Passage. Publishers were put off by the manuscript because it was written in colloquial language and because it described the involvement of African peoples in the commercial aspects of the Atlantic slave trade.

Civil rights activist Kathleen Collins wrote a series of short stories that, after being rejected by MS. magazine, lay in a drawer collecting dust until long after her death. Her daughter eventually compiled them into a collection that was published as What happened to love between the races?

And while an edited, cleaned-up version of Richard Wright’s The man who lived underground was published in 1941, the Library of America published his original manuscript in 2021, a move that Wright’s estate viewed as “poetic justice.”

“The publishing industry at the time was driven by the need to keep readers in a comfort zone with regard to racist ideas,” says the author’s daughter, Julia Wright, in an interview with esquire, “hence the first 50 pages, which graphically depict the police brutality of a coerced confession, were omitted. I regard the details of the rejection of my father’s original, ‘unpleasant’ manuscript as a kind of elegant literary lynching that does not mention his name.”

Kraus certainly seems to have the best intentions.

“It has been the greatest honor of my life to bring Romero’s unfinished novels to a finished state,” Kraus said in a statement. “Romero’s work has helped me grow since I was five years old, and I see this as a small way of returning the favor. … Pay off the debtswhich contains some of the best writing of his career, gave him a blank canvas on which to paint a character-centered, atmospheric and completely surprising horror story. My job was to pick up his brush and fill in the missing pieces. Maybe even put a nice frame around it.”

Would Romero have approved of the finished product? Who can say?

For more information on posthumously published books and what they mean to publishers, see Rebecca’s post on this topic.