Patrick White's Executor and the Decedent's Wishes
The term "Kafka-esque" tends to be overused, but it's probably an appropriate description for the case of Patrick White. Mr. White, Australia's only Nobel Prize winner for literature (in 1973), died in 1990. According to this article,
if White's wishes - as expressed in his will - had been followed, all his unfinished work was to be burnt after his death.
But... the author's literary executor Barbara Mobbs just couldn't do it.
Mr. White's personal papers have now been acquired by The National Library of Australia.
The article goes on to list other similar cases where a writer's work wasn't destroyed even though that was the writer's wish -- a list that includes Hemingway, Orwell, Dickinson, Nabokov, Maugham and, of course, Kafka (whose case I discussed briefly here).
