Posthumous Publications
The ethics of publishing the work of the deceased
About four months after its publication, I sat on the floor of my room, reading Anthony Veasna So’s debut short-story collection, Afterparties: Stories, published in 2021. I was enjoying So’s writing and, nearing the end of the collection, wondering what was next for the young writer. I flipped to the back of the book.
Admittedly, up to this point, I hadn’t read the author’s biography outside of a quick glance. It was standard, a picture of a young twenty-something, a paragraph or so that I hadn’t bothered to read prior to opening the book, nothing too noteworthy. But something caught my eye as I examined his bio: a set of dates. Below the picture of So were the years 1992-2020. A Google search revealed that So had died of an overdose at the age of 28, only one year before the release of his first book. I was reading the words of a dead man.
As I continued to read about his passing, I discovered that So was having a book released in 2023, a novel titled Straight Thru Cambotown. It was incomplete. So wrote not much more than a handful of chapters before his untimely passing.
But Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins, had already signed him for two books. The solution? Add a handful of essays and short stories So had published elsewhere, edit the few chapters he had written before his death, and rake in money off the writing of a man gone before his time. I found myself asking: Is it too soon to publish his second book? Is it fair to publish his second book, considering it was nowhere close to a finished product? Or is the publication of So’s work an extension of his legacy, even if he has no say in what that legacy is?
Following Charles Bukowski’s death, sixty-nine pieces of his work were published between 1995 and 2019. Many were complete manuscripts, though they’d been edited beyond recognition of their source material. Edited out were mentions of drugs, alcohol, anything “distasteful” or “crude.” Instead, a sanitized and altered version of Bukowski’s works came to stand in for the legacy he’d left behind. Editing is an essential part of any writing and publication process. Of course, to say these works should be unedited would be a near-ludicrous assertion. But how does Bukowski go about addressing these edits, six feet under? With no author left, do we mangle the works of the dead and hope?
Sylvia Plath’s posthumous work, Ariel, came only two years after her suicide. It was pushed to publication by her husband, Ted Hughes. Plath’s diary, as well, was published less than two decades after her passing. The diary, initially abridged though released in full in 2000, details her struggles with depression, her strained relationship with her parents, and the hardships she faced both internally and externally. The publication of her journal—of letters she’d written, of poetry she’d never shared—reflects a legacy of hardship, pain, and suffering. In light of her then-recent suicide, it’s hard to tell why Hughes would want such intimate writing publicized.
It’s no secret that Plath’s and Hughes' marriage was strained. Married just months after meeting for the first time, their relationship began to fall apart during his affair with Assia Wevill. This led to one of Plath’s worst battles with her depression. The issues between Hughes and Plath continued until her tragic passing. Letters found after Hughes’ death detailed his emotional and physical abuse of Plath. Her legacy was left in the hands of her abuser.
Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, published the sequel to the novel, called Go Set a Watchman, in 2015, just one year before her passing. Lee had suffered a stroke in 2007 and had been battling with dementia at the time Go Set a Watchman was given to publishers. Controversy stirred around the question of whether or not Harper Lee was able to give informed consent for the publication. The book itself doesn’t reflect many of the values of the first novel. Atticus Finch, the lawyer in To Kill a Mockingbird, fought for the rights of a Black man and supported anti-racist notions. The sequel paints a different portrait of Finch, a racist with very few—if any—of his beliefs carrying over between books. Some have argued that Go Set a Watchman was never intended as a sequel, but rather was an early draft of To Kill a Mockingbird. If this is the case, it makes little sense for Lee to have pushed the book to publication, or to even have signed off on it being published. Much speculation came from whether Lee was physically or mentally well enough to seek publication for her sequel, and whether she would have wanted the book published if she hadn’t been suffering from dementia and recovering from a stroke.
Imagine, for a moment, that you die suddenly tomorrow. Something happened—heart attack, car accident, struck down by lightning, what have you. Many of the things you have written have not made it to publication. The next day, someone—your mom, your best friend, your abusive ex-husband—finds your roughest drafts, the stories you wrote at one in the morning with no intention of them going anywhere. The poems you half completed and abandoned, the essays or the letters that were too personal or too private or perhaps just too poorly written to reach the light of day. You have no say in what is and is not being sent to publishers or how it’s being edited. You can’t control what is being shared under your name, how the public receives it, and how it impacts your legacy. Anything you have ever written during your life, anything you have ever put to paper, is now public. Six feet in the grave, there’s nothing left that you can do about it.
Kelsey Diven (’23) is a recent graduate of Susquehanna University, where she received a Bachelor of Arts in creative writing and publishing & editing, as well as a minor in studio art. She primarily writes in fiction and creative nonfiction. Kelsey’s work can be found in Essay Magazine, The Allegheny Review, and The Sanctuary Magazine.