Must an author’s wishes be honored after death?

Authors once turned to fire to be rid of writing they didn’t want the world to read. Terry Pratchett took a slightly more creative – and modern – route. He ordered that his hard drive be crushed by a steamroller after his death.

|
Ian Nicholson/Reuters/File
British author Terry Pratchett receives his knighthood in London on Feb. 18, 2009.

Authors once turned to fire to be rid of writing they didn’t want the world to read. Terry Pratchett took a slightly more creative – and modern – route. He ordered that his hard drive be crushed by a steamroller after his death. The destroyed drive is now on display at England’s Salisbury Museum. 

The drastic action represents a new solution to a question that has plagued authors, their families, and their publishers for centuries: If an author doesn’t want his or her work published posthumously, must families and publishers comply – even if they believe the work is valuable? “You could say that on the one hand, an author should retain a kind of sovereignty over [his or] her unpublished material...,” says Paul Saint-Amour, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg professor in the humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. 

But what about the possible loss to world culture? Franz Kafka, for instance, told his friend Max Brod he wanted his unpublished works burned after his death. If Brod had done so, Kafka masterpieces “The Trial” or “The Castle” would have been destroyed. Was Brod right not to do so?

Sometimes an author’s desires are difficult to discern. The family of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” author Stieg Larsson used another writer to complete one of his unfinished novels. But Larsson’s partner, Eva Gabrielsson, said Larsson would never have wanted that. “To Kill a Mockingbird” author Harper Lee was alive but older when her second work, “Go Set a Watchman,” was released in 2015. Questions were raised as to whether this was really Lee’s wish. (The Alabama Securities Commission stated that it was.)

Sometimes a good compromise can be delaying publication. Professor Saint-Amour points to “De Profundis,” Oscar Wilde’s 1897 letter to a male lover. The full text appeared in 1962 – long after the letter’s recipient and his family had died. Saint-Amour says, “I think that those surface solutions can be elegant in that they recognize the long-term cultural interest in a work while also recognizing that certain kinds of expressive works can be sensitive for the living.”

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Must an author’s wishes be honored after death?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/2017/1024/Must-an-author-s-wishes-be-honored-after-death
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe