Dying for More

Fans, regardless of their hero's field of endeavor, both love and loathe "the vault," that magical repository of discards and ephemera where, if one delves deep enough into the detritus, a long-buried gem might be recovered. The particular item may be a misplaced painting, an unreleased song, or, for lovers of literature, a misfiled manuscript; but the mixture of excitement and trepidation that accompanies the search is largely the same. On the positive side, the quest promises the possibility of uncovering a work that is not simply previously unknown but one that will completely reframe perceptions of the artist—a revelation, in other words. Dampening the thrill of this pursuit, though, is the anxiety that comes from wondering whether the work has sunk to Mariana Trench depths for a reason. Maybe it does not deserve to see the light of day.

As in life, the disappointments in art tend to outnumber the revelations. For every graduate student who unearths a never-before-read Claude McKay novel in the papers of a notorious New York City "smuthound" (Nathans-Kelly), there is the literary estate that, like Jack Kerouac's, will release a piece of "unfinished juvenilia" such as The Sea is My Brother (2012) that even completists regard as peripheral (Churchwell).¹ In other cases, one wonders exactly what demand prompted the exhumation: so few readers know Pearl S. Buck these days that when The Eternal Wonder (2013) was discovered in a storage closet and published for the first time forty years after her death newspaper accounts had to educate general audiences on who she was and why they should care. (Hint: "the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature" [Bosman].) Then there is the unsettling case of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman. Appearing in July 2015 amid serious questions about the management of the incapacitated Lee's affairs—the author died the following winter—this embryonic attempt at the narrative that grew into To Kill a Mockingbird (1961) was a triumph in hype but little else. The book may have sold 1.6 million copies, but Lee's less-than-heroic presentation of her earliest iteration of Atticus Finch, before she reinvented him as an icon of paternal nobility, confused readers and left many feeling betrayed. Watchman certainly has scholarly value, but selling it as an autonomous novel without even an editorial apparatus to clarify its germinal relationship to its predecessor was an insult to author and audience alike. Nearly three years later, the book stands as an unfortunate coda to a much-beloved classic, one whose handling is spoken about with either a grimace or an eye-roll (Giraldi).

F. Scott Fitzgerald fans have been spared this sort of barrel scraping. Edmund Wilson's edition of The Last Tycoon (1941) raised some questions about the propriety of publishing an "unfinished" work, but the qualms died rapidly as the Fitzgerald revival of the 1940s took off. Today, Fitzgerald studies are unimaginable without Monroe Stahr as the capstone to his creator's fascination with personality and success, while the novel itself has become key to appreciating the writer's simultaneous attraction to/repulsion with Hollywood and the movies. The collections that scholars such as Matthew J. Bruccoli, John Kuehl, and Jackson R. Bryer edited in the 1970s—The Basil and Josephine Stories (1973), Bits of Paradise (1974), and The Price Was High (1979)—made available stories that had disappeared decades earlier in the fleeting periodical pages of Fitzgerald's short-fiction career. Occasional unpublished efforts like "On Your Own" (Price 323–38) or "A Full Life" found their way into a variety of academic journals and mass-market magazines; yet even when featured in Esquire instead of the Princeton University Library Chronicle their appearance was not promoted as an "event" manufactured out of proportion to their literary value, and they did not raise the defenses of reviewers.

Then came August 6, 2012—admittedly late in the day. More than seventy years after...