What Good Are Authors' Estates?

That is the question Virginia Quarterly Review asks, what with all the hullabaloo over estates lately (Nabakov, Steinbeck, etc).

From the piece...

All writers strive towards immortality, but if you are among this aspirational group, it’s prudent to bet on falling short. That is: you will die, and if your works are any good, and thereby profitable to concerned parties, a melodramatic and legalistic morass may appear sooner than any volumes of collected works. Yet many writers fail to make adequate preparations regarding their literary estates, and the two most common mistakes seem to be: 1) no will (or a legally dubious one); and 2) leaving inept, rapacious family members in charge.

Let’s look at a few infamous cases. Stieg Larsson, author of the Millennium trilogy of crime novels, which have been spectacularly popular, posthumously, died at age 50. (One friend claims that his last words were, “I’m 50 for Christ’s sake!”) He had no will and never married his long-time domestic partner, Eva Gabrielsson, who’s now in an ongoing legal dispute with Larsson’s father and brother, the author’s heirs under Swedish law. Franz Kafka famously asked his friend Max Brod to burn all of his work. Fortunate for literary posterity, Brod didn’t burn a thing, but his own papers, which include some Kafka manuscripts of potentially immense value, were left in a moldering Tel Aviv apartment. The saga surrounding them is ongoing (some papers were possibly stolen quite recently), and Haaretz has done a fine job of covering this mess.