Post #4040957

@mxchara@seattle.pink I'm impressed! It does seem that a lot of authors have been posthumously screwed by their descendants. Tolkien's descendants (other than his son Christopher) utterly betrayed his vision for Hollywood cash. And Hugh Lofting's descendants did horrible damage to his works by allowing the outright bowdlerization of Prince Bumpo in the Dr Dolittle books. The only bright spot in •that• particular atrocity was that the complete original text and illustrations of the earlier Dolittle books are now in the public domain, and therefore freely available from Project Gutenberg. I was just thinking that all three of those authors were English, and wondering if there was a point in common. But then I remembered what Livy did to Mark Twain's unpublished works after he died; as I recall, she burned them. And of course Virginia Heinlein published many of Heinlein's works without the editing that was forced on him by his publisher. Although I suspect in that case, Heinlein would have approved–and not just because it was Virginia's decision. But as Isaac Asimov noted with witty circuitousness in "I, Asimov", Heinlein was utterly whipped by every woman he was with. For all that he so proudly proclaimed himself a rugged individualist, he was quite the...doormat in some ways.