Ghost Writers A new wave of posthumous releases from authors like Vladimir Nabokov, David Foster Wallace and Ralph Ellison raises thorny questions abo

By ALEXANDRA ALTER

After author David Foster Wallace committed suicide last September, his longtime agent, Bonnie Nadell, found herself lost in a maze of words. Scattered on two different computers and in hard copies stashed around the cluttered garage where Mr. Foster Wallace had worked in Claremont, Calif., she discovered multiple versions of his final, unfinished novel. She had no idea which draft he preferred. Mr. Wallace's novel about I.R.S. agents, due out next fall, is being assembled based on the author's notes. "A great deal of it is a puzzle," she said of the novel, titled "Pale King."

A new wave of posthumous books by iconic authors is stirring debate over how publishers should handle fragmentary literary remains. Works by Vladimir Nabokov, William Styron, Graham Greene, Carl Jung and Kurt Vonnegut will hit bookstores this fall. Ralph Ellison and the late thriller writer Donald E. Westlake have posthumous novels due out in 2010.

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Illustration by Peter Ferguson
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The posthumous works may generate as much controversy as enthusiasm. Many are incomplete or appear in multiple drafts, raising thorny questions about author intent. Others, dug up from the archives of authors' early and less accomplished work, could be branded disappointing footnotes to otherwise lustrous literary legacies. An unfinished murder mystery by Graham Greene, which is being serialized in the literary magazine, "The Strand," was slammed on the Los Angeles Times's literary blog, Jacket Copy, as "a far cry" from Greene's later works, such as "The Power and the Glory."

While some attribute the surge in posthumous publications to macabre coincidence, others say publishers are more aggressively seeking works by famous dead authors because they have established audiences—an irresistible prospect for a struggling industry. New works by literary giants are "about as much of a sure thing as you could have in a business with few sure things," said Robert Miller, publisher of HarperStudio, a HarperCollins imprint that released a collection of previously unpublished Mark Twain essays and short stories this past spring.

Mark Twain's first executor released only a fraction of his unpublished work—a trove of papers that included some 700 manuscripts—for fear that less polished pieces would damage the author's reputation. Today, nearly 100 years after Twain's death, all but 50 or 60 of those manuscripts have been published, says Robert Hirst, editor of the recent Harper collection "Who Is Mark Twain?" Some critics have charged that many of Twain's posthumous works should have been left in the dustbin, but Mr. Hirst argues that even the flawed works have value.

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Excerpts

* 'Suicide Run,' by William Styron
* 'Look at the Birdie: Unpublished Short Fiction,' by Kurt Vonnegut

"You can learn a lot about how he thought and wrote that you can't learn from reading an edition of 'Huckleberry Finn,'" Mr. Hirst said. "I don't think anything we publish can damage his reputation."

Vladimir Nabokov instructed his family to burn his final novel, "The Original of Laura," after his death. He had sketched out the novel on 138 index cards, a process he used to write "Lolita" and other works. Nobody, not even Mr. Nabokov's son and literary executor, Dmitri Nabokov, knows the exact order the author intended for the cards.

For decades, Dmitri Nabokov kept the manuscript locked in a Swiss bank vault, allowing only a select group of Nabokov scholars to read it, and occasionally suggesting in interviews that he would destroy the novel. In 2008, more than 30 years after his father's death, he announced to a German magazine his decision to publish the work, saying that his father had appeared to him in a vision and told him to "go ahead and publish."

Brian Boyd, a Nabokov scholar and biographer at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, said he initially felt the novel was too "raw" and that Mr. Nabokov's directive to destroy it should be heeded. He first saw a draft in 1985, when Vera Nabokov, the author's wife, allowed him to read it. After her death in 1991, he reread the manuscript and changed his mind