5 Lost Novels Found Again After Their Authors’ Deaths

Dragon Teeth, by Michael Crichton
Considering how proliferate he was in life, it’s not so surprising that Michael Crichton’s widow discovered an unpublished novel in his archives. The forthcoming Dragon Teeth, which is actually the third Crichton book published following his death in 2008, is set in the Wild West, but doesn’t fixate on the gunslingers and lawmen that most western-themed stories go for. Instead, we follow on a pair of real-life paleontologists who took advantage of the lawlessness of the West to pursue fossils with an unbridled—and quite lawless—enthusiasm in what was known as the Bone Wars. Promising a mix of historic truth, patented Crichton research, and his usual flare for storytelling, Dragon Teeth is a must-read for fans of the author. He’s hoping there’s another book hidden in those archives somewhere.

The Knife Slipped, by Erle Stanley Gardner
You might be more familiar with Gardner’s other series, starring a lawyer named Perry Mason, but he also wrote 29 books about Bertha Cool, a large, profane woman who opens a detective agency, hiring the diminutive Donald Lam as her main investigator. Make that 30 books—Gardner wrote The Knife Slipped in 1939, intending it to be the second in the Cool & Lam series. The publisher objected to some of the aspects of the story and the characters, and Gardner simply moved on to the next idea. Found recently in his estate’s papers, this gem is an old-school mystery written by a master at the peak of his powers, telling the story of Lam’s investigation for a divorce case that turns into a potentially profitable police corruption case—until Lam is framed for murder, complicating everything.

The Sea is My Brother, by Jack Kerouac
Seven years before The Town and the City and more than a decade before On the Road, the 21-year-old Kerouac wrote The Sea is My Brother. Many of his iconic themes and ideas are present in this story of an itinerant merchant seaman who encounters a university professor during a drunken evening in New York. The professor takes a leave of absence and joins the seaman on a rambling adventure, hitchhiking to Boston and signing on for a stint at sea. Though inconsistent and rambling, there are flashes of pure genius in there that will take your breath away. If you read On the Road in your youth and found your heart pounding, read this one and understand Kerouac a little better.

The Inheritance, by Louisa May Alcott
Written when she was 17 and undiscovered until the 1990s, The Inheritance was Louisa May Alcott’s first novel—and it shows. While well-written and certainly not boring, it doesn’t approach the level of Little Women or her later works when it comes to pure literary entertainment value. Still, from the perspective of watching an incredible talent develop, it’s an amazing artifact. Alcott wrote the book during a period of grinding misery for her family—poverty and her brother’s mental illness conspired to make their lives almost intolerable, and that might be reflected in the escapist tone of this novel. It follows a fairly common plot outline of the time (1849): a poor Italian orphan girl is brought to a rich estate to be a companion for the children, only to later discover she’s not actually as poor or as orphaned as she seems. Put in context, the book is fascinating, and anybody who has loved Little Women owes it to themselves to read it.

The Eternal Wonder, by Pearl S. Buck
It’s hard to imagine that a writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature would have even so much as a scrap of work unpublished, but this last novel from Buck languished in her files for decades after her death. Written in her final years, the book follows the life of literary genius Randolph “Rann” Colfax, starting with his self-awareness in the womb and following him through his remarkable life as he quickly masters academics and begins traveling the world. Buck clearly intended this to be her final work, andthe only clue as to why its publication was delayed for so long may be the abrupt, possibly unfinished ending.
Which late author do you wish had one last book waiting to be found?