All is Not Lost: 
The Rum Diary, 
Lost Novels 
and Posthumous 
Publications

This week the late great Dr. Hunter S. Thompson’s ‘lost novel’, “The Rum Diary” comes to the silver screen starring Johnny Depp. It was in fact Depp’s discovery of the manuscript in Thompson’s basement that ultimately led to publication in the first place with Thompson’s full support.

A strange or unique story?
Not so much, James M. Cain has a ‘lost novel’, “The Cocktail Waitress” coming out next year- a mere 25 years after his death.

So, is posthumous publication unusual? Not really, Stieg Larsson’s bestselling “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” was published only months after his untimely death. Dead people not only get published, they also win prizes, John Kennedy Toole was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, 12 years after his sad demise in 1969 for the celebrated, “A Confederacy of Dunces” published in 1981- a novel repeatedly rejected in his lifetime.

Perhaps the most famous of the posthumously published was Franz Kafka, whose most famous work,“The Trial” and in fact the bulk of his literary legacy would have been truly lost had his friend and literary executor, Max Brod, not disobeyed Kafka’s explicit wishes to see all his papers destroyed.

So when is a novel truly lost? In 1945 Malcolm Lowry watched as his cabin in Dollarton, British Columbia went up in smoke and with it the nine years of work that went into the 1,000 page manuscript for his novel, “In the Ballast of the White Sea”. He never re-wrote it.
Now, that is what I call lost.

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