You’ve probably heard stories about J.D. Salinger like the ones cited by Hillel Italie in an Associated Press wire story: “In 1999, New Hampshire neighbor Jerry Burt said the author had told him years earlier that he had written at least 15 unpublished books kept locked in a safe at his home. A year earlier, author and former Salinger girlfriend Joyce Maynard had written that Salinger used to write daily and had at least two novels stored away.” Italie notes that Salinger’s daughter, Margaret Salinger, also said her father was writing regularly and even “had a precise filing system for his papers: A red mark meant the book could be released “as is,” should the author die. A blue mark meant that the manuscript had to be edited.” Renata Adler and other Salinger acquaitances have told your faithful MobyLives reporter that Salinger himself showed off the black notebooks he kept his work in to visitors (although never letting them actually read what was in those notebooks).

So what, exactly, did he leave behind, and will it be published? Gordon Lish tells Italie that Salinger told him he was still writing about the Glass family, the stars of his published work. Jay McInerney tells Italie he heard Salinger was writing mostly about “health and nutrition.” McInerney also makes an interesting observation about the potential quality of that work — Salinger’s last publication, the 1965 short story “Hapworth 16, 1924,” was borderline gibbreish. “I have a feeling that his later work is in that vein,” says the Bright Lights, Big City author.

As for whether there are publications to come, well, Italie reports the following responses to his effort to find out:

Richard Wright

Yesterday, Julia and Malcolm Wright, representing the estate of Richard Wright, author of Native Son, repeated their opposition to the Google Book Settlement.

Today, Thursday, January 28, is the deadline for authors to opt out of the settlement.

According to a New York Times report by Mokoto Rich, a statement by the Wrights (a PDF of the statement is available in Rich’s article) warns that the “settlement would effectively grant” Google a “monopoly on content” and that “Copyright law is effectively being amended by a private transaction…”

Comparing the Google proposal to the Patriot Act, the Wrights predict the consequences of the settlement to be “so far-reaching and so packed with heavy ramifications for the future of human society, that only multi-national public arbitration would be appropriate.”

The statement notes that the Wright’s joined the Steinbeck estate in opposing the settlement in May of last year. Last week a Times story reported that the Steinbeck estate has since stated that “the majority of the problems that we found to be troubling have been addressed.”

A Guardian story reported on Friday that Ursula Le Guin has submitted a petition, signed by 367 writers, to Judge Denny Chin asking that “the United States also be exempted from the settlement. We ask that the principle of copyright, which is directly threatened by the settlement, be honored and upheld in the United States.”

The petition begins by noting that the Google settlement was negotiated by the Authors Guild, “without consultation with any other group of authors or American authors as a whole. The Guild cannot and does not speak for all American writers.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

What do an author’s financial records have to say about their work? Plenty, says William J. Quirk, who found himself in a unique position to examine the career of no less than F. Scott Fitzgerald after coming into possession (via a colleague who worked with Fitzgerald’s daughter, Scottie Fitzgerald) of the great writer’s personal financial records, including his tax returns and budget ledgers written in his own hand. And in an essay for The American Scholar, Quirk says “the returns and the ledgers reveal a great deal about Fitzgerald — how he lived and how he struggled.”

For example:

“To start with, his popular reputation as a careless spendthrift is untrue. Fitzgerald was always trying to follow conservative financial principles. Until 1937 he kept a ledger—as if he were a grocer—a meticulous record of his earnings from each short story, play, and novel he sold. The 1929 ledger recorded items as small as royalties of $5.10 from the American edition of The Great Gatsby and $0.34 from the English edition. No one could call Fitzgerald frugal, but he was always trying to save money—at least until his wife Zelda’s illness, starting in 1929, put any idea of saving out of the question. The ordinary person saves to protect against some distant rainy day. Fitzgerald had no interest in that. To him saving meant freedom to work on his novels without interruptions caused by the economic necessity of writing short stories. The short stories were his main source of revenue.”

The records also reveal that some things in the book business haven’t changed all that much — Fitzgerald, even as someone who “from the beginning, was recognized as a major American writer,” didn’t get rich off his famous books. He made far more money off writing for magazines and Hollywood. Says Quirk, “His best novels, The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934), did not produce much income. Royalties from The Great Gatsby totaled only $8,397 during Fitzgerald’s lifetime.”

That’s not the only thing that suggests a writer’s lot is not all so different than it was a century ago. Quirk also details how Fitzgerald — whom the records reveal to have been “impeccably honest” in his reporting to the IRS, at a time when there was far less regulation to be so — struggled to understand his place in the gray area of official American culture inhabited by artists:

On his 1924 tax return, he deducted $2,450 as a business expense for a “trip to Europe for the purpose of obtaining material for stories, etc.” Fitzgerald understood that personal expenses like meals, clothes, and rent are not deductible. But Section 162 of the Internal Revenue Code allows a deduction for the ordinary and necessary expenses of carrying on a trade or business. There is no doubt that being an author is a trade or business. Fitzgerald regularly deducted his recurring expenses—typing, rent, and so forth—without any problem. What about a trip to Europe to gather material? … Fitzgerald’s reasonable argument simply is that the line between personal and business, in his case, didn’t exist. But the IRS has always insisted there is a line—even if it has to be artificially drawn — and when it objected to the deduction, Fitzgerald decided to give it up.

Note, however, one error of scholarship on Quirk’s part: He cites Fitzgerald’s novella May Day as being part of a group of short stories written by Fitzgerald (in a desperate effort to make enough money to get back to novel-writing) in the winter of 1923-24. However, May Day was actually first published in July, 1920 in H.L. Menken’s Smart Set magazine, and collected in 1922 in Tales of the Jazz Age.

John Updike when he was a senior at Harvard in 1954

“Harvard University has acquired the manuscripts, correspondences, and other papers of John Updike, a celebrated member of the Class of 1954 who kept a Harvard library card and frequently visited the campus to research the contemporary culture that enlivened his acclaimed fiction,” reports Tracy Jan in this Boston Globe report.

The new John Updike Archive will be substantial: “Lined up, the entire archive stretches 380 linear feet. It spans 1,500 books, including Updike’s collection of his own work, published in foreign languages and English, as well as books Updike reviewed — with his pencil marks underlining the text, making notes in the margins, or bracketing a particularly well-turned phrase. The papers also include photographs, files of brochures and fliers used in his research, sample dust-jacket designs, and letters from such literary figures as Kurt Vonnegut and Joyce Carol Oates, as well as from fans.”

The collection is so big, says curator Leslie Morris, not only because Updike was prolific, writing right up until his death at age 76 last January, but also because he was “a perfectionist …. He produced multiple drafts of his poetry and prose, revising the computer printouts with pens and pencils, objects that Morris said the library has also acquired.”

Once catalogued, the collection will be open to the public and promises to be revealing: “A close examination of the manuscripts and correspondence reveals the cultural transformations reflected in Updike’s works. In the first edition of ‘Rabbit, Run,’ the 1960 novel that launched Updike into literary stardom, editors and publishers pushed him to remove many of the sex scenes, considered too explicit for the time ….”

The school did not announce what it paid for the collection.

Max Brod

As if fairly well known, on his deathbed, Franz Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to destroy all his writing. Brod didn’t, of course. He in fact went on to publish a lot of that writing, although not all. And when Brod died in 1968, he left all his papers — said to include thousands of “letters, drawings and manuscripts by Kafka himself” — to his “close friend” Esther Hoffe. As journalist Ofer Aderet observes, “by rights the papers he left behind … should by now have been safely ensconced in an archive, a museum, or a library, open to the public, to scholars and to Kafka’s many admirers.” But as Aderet details in this report of Haaretz, “Instead, they are in private hands, apparently being kept in a residential apartment and a number of safes in Tel Aviv,” where Hoffe resided until her death two years ago. Not only that, it seems Hoffe’s daughter, Eva Hoffe, has been selling off various papers, including those of Kafka, “to the highest bidder.”

So now the Israel National Library has taken her to court to ask that Eva Hofe be forced to “hand the papers over to the library so they could be sorted, catalogued and made available to the public.” The resultant hearings, reports Aderet, have been “replete with emotion, suspense, shouting and threats.” Says one observer, “Brod would turn over in his grave if he knew how his estate ended up.”

As Aderet details in a fascinating, in-depth report, “What happened between Brod’s death and the year 2007, when Esther Hoffe died at the age of 102, can only be seen as a betrayal. But unlike Brod’s betrayal of Kafka, thanks to which the world has enjoyed the creations of the great writer, Hoffe’s betrayal of Brod only distanced the writings from the public at large.”

Stephen James Joyce

A Stanford University scholar who wrote a biography on Lucia Joyce, the troubled daughter of James Joyce, has won a years-long battle against the Joyce estate, which had blocked her usage of certain reference material in the book, causing it to be withdrawn from publication. As a report at the Stanford News details, Carol Loeb Shloss had first won the right to republish her book Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake with the expurgated material restored in a 2007 court decision, and now the Joyce estate has finally agreed to pay her litigation costs for that case to the tune of $240,000.

Shloss won her case thanks in part to the support of the Stanford Law School, which Shloss says first got behind her when faculty member (now Harvard professor) Lawrence Lessig heard about the Joyce estate’s forcing her to withdraw the book and said “That’s disgusting.”

As it turns out, the Joyce estate, led by Joyce’s grandson Stephen James Joyce, “had become notorious in scholarly circles for its conflicts with scholars, authors and Joyce enthusiasts,” with a “history of suits and threats of suit ….” In fact, says the Stanford News,

Stephen Joyce has stopped countless public readings of his grandfather’s works and discouraged a generation of research. At one point, he told a prominent Joyce scholar that he was no longer giving permission to quote from any of Joyce’s work. He told one performer, who had simply memorized a portion of Finnegans Wake for an onstage presentation, that he had probably “already infringed” on the estate’s copyright, according to a 2006 New Yorker story. (The performer later discovered that Joyce did not have the right to block his performance.) Shloss herself recalls a conference where a scholar had Joyce’s words projected on a screen rather than risk pronouncing the words in a recorded session.

Lucia Joyce

Which is why Shloss says her victory is “a breakthrough, not just for me but for everybody who has to deal with a literary estate. This has been going on for decades. Scholars are not wealthy people. We don’t have easy access to the legal system to determine and vindicate our rights if someone threatens us with a lawsuit. You just have to give in.” Now, she says, “estates know they can get hurt. They know that scholars have resources now. They just can’t be bullies.”

Jack Kerouac and his mother, Gabrielle

The estate of Jack Kerouac — which includes journals and unpublished manuscripts and thousands of letters, all valued at $20 million — has been thrown into turmoil after a Florida judge ruled that the 1973 will controlling its disposition was a forgery.

According to an Associated Press wire story, Kerouac left everything to his mother, who upon her death in 1973 left it all to Kerouac’s third wife … or did she? “Kerouac’s daughter challenged the will in 1994, after seeing a copy and deciding the signature was fake. She died two years later, but Paul Blake Jr., the writer’s nephew, continued the litigation.” And yesterday a judge agreed with him.

“The ruling is sure to please some Kerouac devotees who have objected to the handling of the writer’s estate,” says the AP report, “including the sale of his raincoat to actor Johnny Depp for $50,000 and the original manuscript scroll of Kerouac’s 1957 classic On the Road, which was sold to the owner of the Indianapolis Colts for $2.43 million.”

One thing that remains unsolved, however, is who committed the forgery, and why?

Elaine McGinnis, an attorney “appointed to represent the estate’s interest,” says, “Everybody is dead now that was ever involved in it, so no one will really ever know.”

Franz Kafka (right) with his friend Max Brod

“Plenty of writers have enjoyed fame beyond the grave that they only dreamt of (or occasionally disdained) in their lifetimes,” observes Nicolette Jones in a story for The Daily Telegraph. For example, she notes, there’s Franz Kafka,who “told his friend Max Brod that he wanted everything he left behind to be burned unread. Brod claimed that he had already told Kafka that he would not honour that request if he were asked, and argued that the fact that he was chosen as literary executor proved that Kafka did not mean it.”

On the other hand, observes Jones, “Sometimes posthumous publication is controversial, because no one can be sure that the author wanted the work to see the light of day. This includes Tolstoy’s The Living Corpse, Jack Kerouac’s first novel The Sea Is My Brother and Dr Seuss’s Daisy-Head Mayzie. Robert Heinlein tried to destroy all copies of his first novel, For Us, The Living, but made the mistake of leaving a manuscript in a friend’s garage. Mark Twain told his brother to “shove a letter in the stove” because he didn’t want any “absurd literary remains” published after he was “planted”. But 99 years later a collection of unpublished essays and stories came out. Vladimir Nabokov’s son defied the wishes of his father to bring out The Original of Laura. And Douglas Adams’s The Salmon of Doubt, put together from scraps of writing he left behind, led some fans to think it was clearly stuff he would not have wanted subjected to public scrutiny.”

Ron Rosenbaum thinks the recent ruckus over a “sequel” to J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye — see the earlier MobyLives report — bears some resemblance to “the recent contretemps over Vladimir Nabokov’s last unfinished manuscript, The Original of Laura.”

As Rosenbaum explains in his Slate column, Nabokov left specific instructions that the Laura manuscript should be destroyed if he died before finishing it (an order his surviving son, Dmitri, disobeyed, as another old Moby report details). Now, the “sequel” case has prompted Rosenbaum to muse over work Salinger may or may not have done over the last 45 years that he hasn’t published — including the tantalizing idea that Salinger may be upset about the so-called “sequel” because he’s written his own.

But “What if, like Nabokov, he decides that it’s not finished?” asks Rosenbaum. “What if Salinger—perhaps prompted by Dmitri’s decision to contravene his father’s wishes posthumously—decides to take action beforehe dies? And by ‘action’ I mean consigning years of work to the flames so no opportunistic estate can decide to enrich itself at his expense by publishing it.”

Rosenbaum says he’s worried enough to have “fantasized about someone breaking in and saving the manuscript,” and he notes someone has gone so far as to have written a Kindle book called J.D.: The Plot to Steal J.D. Salinger’s Manuscripts.

But beyond cultishness, “You might ask why it will be important to read whatever Salinger leaves behind,” says Rosenbaum. “I think it will certainly be more important to our understanding of Salinger than Laura’s note cards will be to our understanding of Nabokov.”

The 138 index cards that comprise Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura

A publication date for Vladimir Nabokov’s unfinished novel The Original of Laura has finally been announced: according to a Bookseller report by Benedicte Page, Penguin UK will publish it in the UK, and Knopf in the US, simultaneously on November 3.

The report gives the details of the British deal: Penguin closed a six-figure deal negotiated by agent Andrew Wylie that will also see Penguin reprinting the etnire Nabokov backlist. But the report doesn’t detail the American deal — it doesn’t say, for example, whether Knopf bought US rights from Penguin or the Nabokov estate in a similar, multi-title deal.

Nor does the report explain how an unfinished book that isn’t realy a book — isn’t even a manuscript, it’s actually what would in a more honest world be called scholarly matter: 138 index cards of notes — justifies a whopping $35 cover price here, while Penguin’s goes for £24.07. (Time to think like a publisher: Hmmm … one card per page, facing page of descriptive hoo-haw … wide margins … other photos ((author, writing)) … lengthy introduction AND a preface, maybe a foreword too … lots of back matter — oh yes, and hard covers …..)

As detailed in a previous MobyLives story, Nabokov himself felt strongly the material was not publishable and left explicit orders to burn it if he died before finishing. However, more than three decades after Nabokov’s death in 1977, his son, Dmitri Nabokov, was persuaded to break those orders by a persuasive team from Penguin–the Bookseller doesn’t indicate whether Knopf was involved–and, of course, that stalwart champion of mother literature, Andrew Wylie.

The Penguin editor over-seeing the project, Alexis Kirschbaum, explained to The Bookseller why Penguin’s publication of the notes against the author’s wishes — let alone their presentation of it as a book — is legit: “I’m an avid, obsessed fan of Nabokov and for other fans it’s incredibly interesting to see his handwriting and read his prose—not necessarily extremely polished, but you can still see kernels of genius in everything he wrote.”

Except for that list of instructions he left behind, it seems.