WITH the brouhaha surrounding Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, one would think this is the first time something like this has happened but as it stands, she is in good company. When Hemingway’s unfinished novel, True at First Light, was first published in 1999, it drew similar remarks and comments to those currently being made about Go Set a Watchman. Literary critics wondered whether the author would have let anyone read his unpolished draft, let alone publish it.

The posthumous publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s The Original of Laura in 2009 drew a similar mixed reaction from critics. The noted Russian author was working on the novel before his death in 1977 and had asked his wife and son to destroy the manuscript. His son, however, chose to publish it, leaving many wondering if it had tarnished the literary icon’s reputation.

However, not all writers’ incomplete works have caused such a stir. Nobel Prizewinner Albert Camus’s The First Man — a yet unfinished autobiographical novel that he was working on before his death in a car crash in 1960 — was published in 1994 by the writer’s daughter, Catherine, and is considered by many to be a masterpiece. Similarly, David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, the novel that he was working on before he committed suicide in 2008, was published in 2011 and was even nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 2012.