10 Greatest Writers Who Became Famous After Death

10 Greatest Writers Who Became Famous After Death by Anna Miller at onlinedegree.
The old cliché states that artists and writers never achieve true fame or appreciation for their creative output until after their death. While the advent of bestselling authors who peddle their wares on television, radio, and other media outlets, the seductive cult of celebrity has begun trickling its way into the literary world at a much faster pace than yesteryear. But the following writers never had a chance to see the greater influence and love that their painstaking, passionate work earned due to dying before receiving recognition. Some, of course, never actively sought critical or academic renown for their novels, short stories, essays, or poems – though their intentions do not exclude them from proving the old adage true.

1. John Kennedy Toole

Following his disheartening 1969 suicide, John Kennedy Toole would go on to leave a permanent mark on the American literary landscape with his hilarious and heartbreaking A Confederacy of Dunces. His route towards history is indelibly marked by tragedy and well-known to anyone familiar with the brilliant novel and its lesser-known companion The Neon Bible. Toole’s mother Thelma brought the found manuscripts to Loyola University New Orleans professor Walker Percy in 1976. Initially skeptical of her claims that her son was a phenomenal writer, Percy found himself surprisingly bowled over by the grotesquely entertaining Ignatius Reilly and Toole’s pitch-perfect depiction of life in New Orleans and rallied to find a publisher for A Confederacy of Dunces. Louisiana State University agreed, and in 1980 Toole went on to win a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for the novel. Today, it remains a much-beloved work of American literature with a healthy and continuous following – studied frequently in high school and college-level English classes across the United States and subjected to many painstaking dissections by scholars and academics.

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