Author Existence Failure: Difference between revisions

* [[Herman Melville]] died before completing his final novel, ''Billy Budd''.

* [[Vladimir Nabokov]] died before finishing ''[[wikipedia:The Original of Laura|The Original of Laura]]''. What remains is a series of notecards with isolated scenes and plot which only his family and a few selected scholars have seen. He requested that the notecards be burnt in the event of his death, but his son, believing that the story was Nabokov's best, agonized for 30 years before deciding in 2008 to publish it.

* Robert C. O'Brien, author of the Newbury Medal Award-winning ''[[The Secret of NIMH|Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH]]'', passed away shortly before finishing his [[After the End|post-apocalyptic]] children's novel ''[[Z for Zachariah]]''. Luckily, his wife and daughter (authors themselves) finished it based off the notes he left behind and published it posthumously. His daughter, Jane Leslie Conly, went onto publish two more ''NIMH'' books.

* Mervyn Peake died when ''Titus Alone'', part three of his ''[[Gormenghast]]'' trilogy, was still in early drafts. His widow, Maeve Gilmore, submitted his manuscript to the publisher with notes on how it could be improved. Unfortunately, the publishers took these notes as the intended changes themselves, and published the novel as is. The novel was later re-edited by Langdon Jones into something (presumably) closer to Peake's intended version. In 2010, a manuscript of the fourth novel, completed by Gilmore, [http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2010/jan/18/shortcuts-fourth-gormenghast-novel-discovered was discovered by the family.] It was published in 2011 as ''Titus Awakes''.