View Single Post
Old 04-20-2011, 12:54 PM   #47
JDK1962
Groupie
JDK1962 ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.JDK1962 ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.JDK1962 ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.JDK1962 ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.JDK1962 ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.JDK1962 ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.JDK1962 ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.JDK1962 ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.JDK1962 ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.JDK1962 ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.JDK1962 ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
JDK1962's Avatar
 
Posts: 154
Karma: 2054094
Join Date: Apr 2011
Location: Boulder, CO
Device: Kindle Voyage, Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (for PDFs)
Not sure anyone's been arguing for "no posthumous publication of written works." The argument is around the wishes of the writer. There have been plenty of writers with terminal medical conditions who labored to finish a final work before death and failed to do so; someone else picked up the torch and did the final writing and/or editing, and no doubt the original author would be grateful.

There are other authors (O'Toole springs to mind) who try to find a publisher and fail, and only after death is their work published. Would such authors object? Probably not, but is it really a legal/ethical issue? They created property which passed to an heir, and the heir made a choice about what is now their property.

It's such an individual thing that I don't think anyone can simply make a blanket statement that "the author would [never|always] want their unpublished work to be published," or correctly state that any such publishing is never anything other than greedy heirs exploiting a corpse.

The stark reality is that the unpublished work of the vast majority of authors has little real value while they're alive, and even less when they're dead. Really significant fame and/or literary merit is the only thing that changes that statement. It's a problem that would probably be nice to have, and is extremely easy to solve with a little forethought.
JDK1962 is offline   Reply With Quote