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Call me jaded, but whenever I hear a book from a famous and long-deceased author has "been discovered", I assume that it has been known for decades but the publ
by Mediterraneo10 9y ago
Call me jaded, but whenever I hear a book from a famous and long-deceased author has "been discovered", I assume that it has been known for decades but the publisher only now thought it would be economically propitious to make it available. That is, after all, what we have seen innumerable times in the case of Tolkien and many classic science-fiction writers.
- erikpukinskis 9y agoYou're jaded.
- jmcgough 9y agoPublishers do this every time a famous author dies or becomes incompetent (in the legal sense of the word). Go Set a Watchman was a very early draft of To Kill a Mockingbird but sold to the public as an uncovered sequel novel a short while after Harper Lee's sister Alice died.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoMaybe. The story in the article is a lot more plausible than, say, Harper Lee's agent saying "Harper Lee has just decided to release this book that she never wanted to release, immediately after her last living relative died, and also she doesn't want to talk to anyone but me about it."
- samth 9y agoFor Tolkien, at least, none of his posthumous books are accurately described the way you characterize them.
- Mediterraneo10 9y agoNot so. The material in "Unfinished Tales" was known since at least immediately after Tolkien's death, but publication was delayed for years until "The Silmarillion" had been published and allowed to soak up bestseller attention for a while first. The same is true of "The Tale of Beren and Lúthien", which Christopher Tolkien was aware of all those years since his father's death, but it was decided to save them for a rainy day.