The New York Observer takes note of how a dead author is making big money.
From the article...
The death of the author, it would seem, has changed all that. Next month will see the publication of The Pale King, the unfinished novel Wallace left stacked in a pile in his garage. This comes on the heels of two other posthumous books in the 30 months since his passing: This Is Water, a 4,000-word commencement address he delivered at Kenyon College in 2005, which was stretched to book length by the neat trick (one critic termed it "un-Wallace-like") of printing only one sentence per page; and Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, Wallace's undergraduate philosophy thesis, padded with a number of essays by distinguished philosophers.
We have not heard the last of him. Indeed, the 34 document boxes and eight oversize folders of Wallace's drafts, letters and juvenilia deposited at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, along with 300 books from his personal library, promise a posthumous flow that will be, if not infinite, then certainly robust. There may be another book of unpublished fiction soon in the offing, and one of uncollected nonfiction, as well as potentially two books of Wallace's letters, one of which is said to be devoted almost entirely to his correspondence about the art of writing.
Then there are Wallace's Boswells. David Lipsky, who was commissioned by Rolling Stone to shadow the author on the Infinite Jest book tour (the piece was killed), last year re-purposed his transcripts of their road trip into a 300-page book, And of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. D.T. Max, who wrote a feature-length obituary of Wallace for The New Yorker framing Wallace's suicide as the end of a long struggle against both depression and avant-garde tendencies, is expanding his efforts into a full-blown literary biography slated to appear later this year.
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