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Old 04-20-2011, 09:39 AM   #39
JDK1962
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Join Date: Apr 2011
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Agree with those saying it's up to the author to deal with. But (IMHO) very, very, very few writers will ever have the problem.

I'm sure the big commercial names (e.g., Robert Ludlum, L. Ron Hubbard) are laughing in their graves about their names continuing to appear on books, since I feel confident in saying they were writing for the money anyway. I've no doubt that, 30 years after James Patterson's demise, we'll still be seeing books coming out of his factory ("based on a 3-second rambling of James Patterson into a Dictaphone!"), and he's probably already planned it out.

For the literary names, it's a harder call. Agree that if they thought something was publishable, they probably would have published it. To take the original post, I think if DFW wanted his book finished/published, he would have stuck around to do it. But he clearly could have left a direction of what to do with it. Or burned it. Point is, he gave up control of his own work, and for better or worse, the result is in his canon now.

Writing is (intellectual) property with real value, and it's unrealistic to think that heirs won't treat it as such. IMHO, Kafka is really the only special case worth discussing, since it's probably the best known case of a writer's explicit wishes being overridden. It opens up a very rare but philosophically interesting can of worms.
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