May | 2015 | Guy Portman's Blog

11 Posthumously Published Novels

May 29 2015

This week’s blog post is dedicated to posthumously published novels. They are presented in chronological order.

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (1817)

Northanger Abbey was Jane Austen’s first novel. It is thought that it was written circa 1798-99. Although the book was sold to Crosby & Co. in 1803 they decided against publication. The book was later sold back to Jane’s brother Henry. Northanger Abbey was finally published in December 1817, 5 months after its author’s demise.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens (1870)

When England’s most famous author Charles Dickens died in June 1870, his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, remained unfinished. As a result when it was published later that year the book’s killer was not revealed. The general consensus is that John Jasper, Edwin’s uncle, is the murderer.

Bouvard et Pécuchet by Gustave Flaubert (1881)

Gustave Flaubert never finished his satirical novel Bouvard et Pécuchet, despite starting work on it in 1872. Flaubert intended that it would be his seminal work, eclipsing his most acclaimed novel, Madame Bovary. However, when the book was finally published a year after the author’s death in 1880 it was not well received.

The Ivory Tower by Henry James (1917)

At the time of his death in 1916 Henry James was still working on The Ivory Tower. The book was published without an ending the year after his demise. It went on to receive considerable praise for its criticism of excessive wealth and laissez faire capitalism, although some criticised its dense prose and slow pace.

You Can’t Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe (1940)

When Thomas Wolfe died in 1938 he left behind a vast unpublished script titled, The October Fair. His editor transformed the manuscript into the novel You Can’t Go Home Again. It is about an author who writes a book about small town America. The book goes down so badly in his hometown that he is unable to return home.

Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf (1941)

Between the Acts is a novel about a festival play in an English village, set shortly before the outbreak of WWII. It is replete with innuendo and hidden meanings. After finishing the manuscript Woolf entered a deep depression. On the 28th March 1941 she drowned herself in the River Ouse. The novel was published 4 months later.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980)

John Kennedy Toole was unsuccessful in getting A Confederacy of Dunces published during his lifetime, which resulted in him becoming very depressed, culminating in his suicide in 1969. In 1980, 11 years after his death, his mother succeeded in getting it published. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1981.

Gather Yourselves Together by Philip K Dick (1994)

Philip K Dick is one of the most famous science fiction writers of all time. However, despite writing Gather Yourselves Together early in his writing career, it was not published until 12 years after his death. Publishers had initially refused it due to the length of the manuscript (481 pages).

Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man by Joseph Heller (2000)

Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man is about an aging writer attempting to write a novel that would emulate his earlier efforts. An apt subject matter considering that Heller’s most famous work, Catch-22, was published in 1961. Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man was published posthumously in 2000, the year after his death.

The Millennium Series by Stieg Larsson (2005-2007)

At the time of his death in 2004 aged 50, Larsson’s Millennium Series were unpublished manuscripts sitting in his house. The trilogy saw the author achieve posthumous fame. In 2008 Larsson was the second highest selling author in the world. To date over 60 million copies of the Millennium Series have been sold worldwide.

The Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov (2009)

Nabokov had requested that the novel he was working on at the time of his death in 1977 be destroyed. In 2008 Nabokov’s son announced plans to publish it, and the following year, 32 years after his father’s demise, The Original of Laura was published. Many castigated the book, arguing that it was in no fit state to be published.

7 Famous Controversial Novels

May 22 2015

Here are 7 famous controversial novels from the last 250 years. They are presented in chronological order:

Fanny Hill by John Cleland (1748-1749)

Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure or Fanny Hill as it is popularly known was published in 2 parts in 1748 & 1749. Written during its author’s stint in a debtor’s prison, Fanny Hill is considered to be the first erotic novel in the English language. It is one of the most banned and prosecuted books of all time. In November 1749 Cleland was arrested and charged with ‘corrupting the King’s subjects’.

Candide by Voltaire (1759)

Candide is a satirical novella that was regarded as being highly controversial at the time of its publication. Its author, the ardent critic Voltaire, not only criticised the prevailing philosophical ideology of his era, optimism, but also attacked the greed and hypocrisy within the state and church. The religious and secular authorities denounced the book, and it continued to cause controversy into the 20th Century.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Life Among the Lowly as it is also known was deemed at the time of its publication as a scathing attack on the slave-owning South. The book was so reviled in the South that it spawned a raft of what came to be known as Anti-Tom literature. The book is regarded as having been instrumental in stirring the abolitionist cause that was to culminate in The Civil War.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence (1928)

Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a fictional account of a married woman’s affair with her gamekeeper. Although published, it was heavily censored due to its perceived pornographic content. In 1960, 30 years after Lawrence’s death, Penguin attempted to publish the original version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but was forced to go to trial because of the ‘Obscene Publications Act’ of the previous year. The book was banned in the America until 1959.

Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs (1959)

Burrough’s seminal work, the non-linear Naked Lunch, is a sardonic, dark and humorous work that takes the form of a series of loosely linked vignettes. It draws on Burroughs’s own experiences living as a drug addict in the U.S., Mexico and Tangier. The book was viewed as being so scandalous at the time of its publication that it underwent a court case under U.S. obscenity laws.

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (1988)

The title of The Satanic Verses was deemed offensive by many Muslims, as it refers to a number of allegedly pagan verses, temporarily included in the Qur’an and later removed. Some pious Muslims were also displeased that the prophet Abraham was referred to as a ‘bastard’, in addition to various other insertions. In January 1989 the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a Fatwa against the author. To this day Rushdie receives death threats.

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (1991)

American Psycho is a satire of the yuppy culture of the 1980s that brought Easton Ellis instant fame. It is about a young, psychopathic Wall Street financier. The book caused outrage when it was published due to its explicit violence, sexual content and perceived misogynistic themes. Its author received numerous death threats. American Psycho was deemed harmful to minors in Germany and sold shrink-wrapped in Australia.

My Top 4 Transgressive Authors

May 15 2015

Definition: Transgressive literature is a genre that focuses on characters who feel confined by the norms and expectations of society and who break free of those confines in unusual and/or illicit ways. Protagonists in Transgressive literature are in one form or other rebelling against society. Due to this they may appear to be anti-social, nihilistic or even sociopathic.

These are my top 4 Transgressive authors. Click on the book links to read my reviews.

Charles Bukowski

August 16th 1920 – March 9th 1994

Heavily influenced by his home city of Los Angeles, Bukowski wrote about disillusionment, alcohol consumption, women, a loathing of authority and the dehumanising nature of low-level work, all presented in his unique visceral writing style. His seminal work, Post Office, is a semi-autobiographical account of his years of drudgery at the post office. Bukowski is a cult figure, whose writing remains popular to this day.

My Favourite: Post Office

Would also recommend: Ham On Rye & Pulp

Bret Easton Ellis

Born: March 7th 1964

Disillusioned, nihilistic and even sociopathic characters are the staple of cult author Bret Easton Ellis’s books. His most famous work, the infamous American Psycho, caused outrage even before it was published, as many in the literary establishment were disgusted with the sexual violence and what some viewed as the misogynistic nature of its contents. American Psycho went on to become one of the most influential books of the nineties and secured the author his legacy as an important literary figure.

My Favourites: American Psycho & Less Than Zero

Chuck Palahniuk

Born: February 21st 1962

Palahniuk has constantly courted controversy with the content of his books. Fight Club, which remains to this day his most celebrated effort, was viewed as extremely controversial when the film version was released in 1999, only six months after the Columbine school shootings. Palahniuk’s dark and disturbing fiction has continued to scandalise ever since. His book Haunted is often voted in polls as one of the most disturbing books ever written.

My Favourite: Fight Club

Would also recommend: Damned, Haunted & Rant

William S. Burroughs

February 5th 1914 – August 2nd 1997

William S. Burroughs, was a controversial character with a penchant for rent boys and heroin, who rebelled against the social norms of his era by writing about disillusionment, drugs and homosexuality. Arguably his most famous book, the non-linear Naked Lunch was viewed as so scandalous at the time of its publication that it underwent a court case under U.S. obscenity laws.

My Favourite: Junky

Would also recommend: Queer

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7 Politically Inclined Authors

May 08 2015

This is a post that I wrote a while back about famous authors who held strong political opinions.

The following 7 authors were all politically inclined:

Hunter S. Thompson

(July 18th 1937 – February 20th 2005)

The father of Gonzo journalism was an iconic figure in the counter-culture. Despite his love of firearms and ardent support of the Second Amendment, Thompson’s politics were firmly entrenched in the far-left. A sworn enemy of Richard Nixon, he was vociferous in his support of George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election. He covered the election in dispatches for Rolling Stone, which laid the foundation for his book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72.

Click here to read my review of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

John Steinbeck

(February 27th 1902 – December 20th 1968)

John Steinbeck was a prolific novelist and short-story writer, and one of the most acclaimed literary figures America has ever produced. The author was very critical of capitalism and a supporter of unionisation, recurring themes in many of his books. His most famous work, The Grapes of Wrath, was viewed as so controversial at the time of its publication due to its criticism of the nation’s economic plight that it was burned on 2 separate occasions in the author’s hometown of Salinas.

Click here to read my review of In Dubious Battle.

Zora Neale Hurston

(January 7th 1891 – January 28th 1960)

Zora Neale Hurston was an American folklorist, anthropologist and author, who wrote 4 novels and more than 50 short stories, plays and essays. Her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was published in 1937. The highly opinionated Hurston could probably best be described as a conservative libertarian. Unlike many of her Soviet sympathising colleagues in the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston, a staunch patriot, was vehemently anti-Communist. She often referred to them as ‘commies’ and ‘reds’ in her writing.

Maxim Gorky

(March 28th 1868 – June 18th 1936)

Maxim Gorky is one of Russia’s most popular authors. His opposition to the Tsarist regime led to him being arrested on numerous occasions. Gorky, who associated with many revolutionaries, became a friend of Lenin. Later he provided financial support to the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Widely accepted as being the first famous Russian writer to emerge from the proletariat, Gorky is remembered as being a lifelong supporter of the Bolshevik cause and the founder of the Socialist realism literary method.

Click here to read my review of My Childhood.

Leo Tolstoy

(September 9th 1828 – November 20th 1910)

Russian novelist Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy is widely regarded as being one of the greatest writers of all time. His most famous works are War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Tolstoy was a Christian Anarchist, who believed that non-resistance was the only way to achieve a Utopian society. His beliefs influenced Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. Tolstoy’s argument that peaceful anarchy could only be brought about by non-violent revolution is explained in his essay On Anarchy (1900).

Kurt Vonnegut

(November 11th 1922 – April 11th 2007)

Vonnegut was an American author, whose writing incorporated science fiction, black humour and satire. He was a pacifist intellectual and supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union. When he died in 2007 The New York Times described him as ‘the counterculture’s novelist’. His seminal work, Slaughterhouse-Five, is a satire about a survivor of the notorious firebombing of Dresden in World War II. Its anti-war rhetoric has resulted in it being banned by numerous US schools and libraries.

Click here to read my review of Slaughterhouse-Five.

George Orwell

(June 25th 1903 – January 21st 1950)

Author and journalist George Orwell was interested in social injustice, opposed to totalitarianism and committed to democratic socialism. So strongly was Orwell opposed to Fascism that he even volunteered to fight in The Spanish Civil War. His experiences there gave rise to his book, Homage to Catalonia (1938). Orwell’s most famous works, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, both warned of the dangers of totalitarianism. They were perceived as being a thinly disguised attack on Stalin and banned in the Soviet Union.

Click on the links to read my reviews of Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier.

8 Posthumously Famous Authors

May 01 2015

Here are 8 posthumously famous authors.

Franz Kafka

(July 3rd 1883 – June 3rd 1924)

Franz Kafka is today regarded as one of the greatest European writers of the 20th Century. Born in Prague in what was then The Austro-Hungarian Empire, Kafka did not find fame during his lifetime, and what little of his writing was published received only scant attention from the public. Kafka, though always committed to his craft, spent his days working in a variety of roles in the insurance sector, and later managing a family-owned asbestos factory.

Click here to read my review of The Metamorphosis and Other Stories.

Emily Dickinson

(December 10th 1830 – May 15th 1886)

Emily Dickinson was a prolific poet with over 1700 poems to her name. During her lifetime Dickinson had fewer than a dozen poems published, and it was only after her death that she became famous. Her very private nature was undoubtedly one reason for her lack of acclaim during her lifetime. Today she is remembered as an iconic poet and one of the most acclaimed American female writers of all time.

Karl Stig-Erland ‘Stieg’ Larsson

(August 15th 1954 – November 9th 2004)

Larsson was a renowned journalist and an independent researcher. However, at the time of his death in 2004 aged 50, his Millennium Series were unpublished manuscripts sitting in his house. The trilogy saw the author achieve posthumous fame. In 2008 Larsson was the second highest selling author in the world. The Millennium Series has been adapted for film and television. To date over 60 million copies of the Millennium Series have been sold worldwide.

Sylvia Plath

(October 27th 1932 – February 11th 1963)

Sylvia Plath was a well-regarded poet during her short-life. Examples of her early success included winning The Glascock Prize for poetry in 1955. Plath, who had a history of depression, committed suicide in 1963. Her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, published a month before her death in the UK and in the US in 1971, went on to achieve critical acclaim. In 1982 Plath won the coveted Pulitzer Prize posthumously for The Collected Poems.

Click here to read my review of The Bell Jar.

Jane Austen

(December 16th 1775 – July 18th 1817)

Jane Austen achieved a degree of recognition during her lifetime, but she received little personal renown, due in part because she published anonymously. After her death her books became steadily more popular. It was the 20th Century that saw Jane Austen’s meteoric rise to iconic status. Today the author’s fame has transcended the literary world, evidence of which is her being ranked number 70 out of ‘100 Greatest Britons of all time’.

Jim Thompson

(September 27th 1906 – April 7th 1977)

Thompson is best remembered for his paperback pulp novels. He became well known for The Killer Inside Me (1952), and later wrote and co-wrote Hollywood screenplays. This success was only fleeting however and when he died in 1977 he was largely forgotten. Today he is widely acclaimed as being one of the greatest crime writers of all time. His novels are back in print and two of them have been adapted for the silver screen.

Click on the links to read my reviews of The Killer Inside Me and Savage Night.

Henry David Thoreau

(July 12th 1817 – May 6th 1862)

Henry David Thoreau’s prodigious writing output consists of nearly 20 volumes of writing. He self-published one of his book’s, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, but only sold 300 of the 1000 copies that he had printed. It was only after his death in 1862 that he began to receive the attention that he deserved. The event that was to herald this transformation was the publishing of his journal in 1906.

Edgar Allan Poe

(January 19th 1809 – October 7th 1849)

Edgar Allan Poe was an author, poet, literary critic and editor who flirted with fame for much of his working life. If it were not for his rather premature death, the cause of which is debated to this day, Poe might have become famous. Today he is remembered not only as being one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story, but is also generally considered to be the inventor of the detective fiction genre.

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Archive - May 2015

11 Posthumously Published Novels

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7 Famous Controversial Novels

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My Top 4 Transgressive Authors

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7 Politically Inclined Authors

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8 Posthumously Famous Authors

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Archive - May 2015

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