Posthumous publication

For example, the composer Jonathan Larson died the day before his musical Rent opened off-Broadway.

[2] A carbon copy of A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole was found by his mother after his death in 1969.

In other cases, additional authors add to the surviving manuscript to produce a completed version for publication.

[9] Vladimir Nabokov left instructions that drafts of The Original of Laura should be burnt after his death, but in 2009 it was published.

Examples include texts that have been edited many times previously and where the author's original words are not universally agreed, such as in Shakespeare's plays.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries performing musicians would release interpretive editions of classical compositions that differed from the composer's original notation.

In 2023, Penguin Random House announced the Roald Dahl's children's novels would be republished in the United Kingdom with changes to the text to keep them "relevant for each new generation".

[12] The edits were described by Salman Rushdie as "absurd censorship", and Queen Camilla was said to be "shocked and dismayed".

[15] Marek Kosmulski coined the term "necroauthorship" to refer to scientific misconduct in which ineligible deceased co-authors are included in a paper's author list.

[6] In 2019, Huawei used artificial intelligence on a smartphone to generate a melody for third and fourth movements of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony.

[21] Mark Twain did not want his autobiography to be published until 100 years after his death because he did not like the idea that people would be hurt by what he said about them.

[24] Other books described as posthumous autobiographies were not written as such, but are collections of the subject's work collated after their death.

For example, Lorraine Hansberry's To Be Young, Gifted and Black is a collection of private writing and public statements collated by her husband Robert B.

Robert Falcon Scott's final diary entries describe conditions outside his tent on the Antarctic expedition that would claim his life.

[27] Anne Frank initially wrote her diary as a private journal, then rewrote it with plans for publication.

For example, the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle is said to have "hated the Nachlass industry and thought that he had destroyed everything of his that he had not chosen to publish himself.