Literary estate

A literary executor is a person acting on behalf of beneficiaries (e.g. family members, a designated charity, a research library or archive) under a deceased author's will.

If a sympathetic and understanding friend is in the position of literary executor, there can be conflict: what is to be managed is not just a portfolio of intellectual property but a posthumous reputation.

Examples of literary executors include Sir Edward Marsh for Rupert Brooke, Robert Baldwin Ross for Oscar Wilde, Robert Hayward Barlow for H. P. Lovecraft, Rush Rhees, G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe for Ludwig Wittgenstein, Otto Nathan for Albert Einstein, Regine Olsen for Søren Kierkegaard and Paul Williams for Philip K. Dick.

A particularly notorious example is Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche for Friedrich Nietzsche, as she resorted to fraud to make her brother's Nachlass more compatible with Nazi ideology.

Although he did not originally intend that the stenographs of his thousands of lectures be published, he relented and named his second wife, Marie Steiner-von Sivers, to direct his Nachlass, which has produced more than three hundred volumes since his death in 1925.

Adrian Conan Doyle (left) executor of the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle (right)
Adrian Conan Doyle (left) son and from 1940, executor of the literary estate of Arthur Conan Doyle (right)