Famous Authors Who Only Became Famous After They Died

When we think of the authors we admire most, we imagine them as having experienced successful careers and enjoyed recognition from their peers. The truth is that many of our favorite authors were not recognized or even published during their lifetime. We took a look at some famous authors who only became famous after they died.

Stieg Larsson
Lisbeth Salander may be one of the most iconic characters in modern crime literature, but we came very close to never hearing about The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo protagonist at all.
The Millennium crime series was only published after its author Stieg Larsson died of a heart attack in 2004. Larsson had enjoyed a successful career as a journalist and he only worked on the crime series in his own time after work. He wrote for his own pleasure and had never really made an effort to have his books published. When he died, the three completed manuscripts were discovered and it was not long before they were released.
As of 2015, the series have sold over 80 million copies making them some of the most popular books in recent years. It has been adapted twice; once in Sweden starring Noomi Rapace and in the US with David Fincher directing Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara.
To say Steig Larsson only became known after he died is somewhat unfair, but the Millennium book series made him one of the most famous authors in the world. More than ten years after they were published you can see still people reading his books in airports, on the train and by the swimming pool or on the beach.

Franz Kafka
If you enjoy the works of Franz Kafka, then you owe a man called Max Brod a big thank you. If it was not for Brod, then classic novels such as The Trial and The Castle would have been destroyed without having ever been read.
Kafka’s influence on literature is huge. He basically invented a whole new genre of writing and his effects can still be felt today in some of the best and most innovative television shows and movies. It’s hard to imagine that he went unappreciated during his lifetime.
The Metamorphosis author lived a sad life. He had a strained relationship with his father, his brothers died when he was a child, and his sisters would be later killed in World War II. In 1917, he contracted tuberculosis and over time his condition worsened. It reached the point where it was too painful for him to eat and shortly after he died of starvation.
Most of the work that we have now come to know Kafka for were unpublished at the time of his death. He had entrusted his writing to his friend Max Brod and ordered that he destroy it all after his death. Of course, as we know, Brod ignored those wishes and instead Kafka became one of the most important fiction writers of the 20^th century.

H.P. Lovecraft
These days, you can see the influence of H.P. Lovecraft everywhere from the novels of Stephen King, Guillermo Del Toro movies like Pan’s Labyrinth and Pacific Rim, and even computer games such as the Elder Scrolls and Warcraft.  During his lifetime, however, Lovecraft found himself stuck in pulp fiction and ghost writing.
Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu spawned a mythos that has influenced science fiction and horror for decades. During his life, however, he struggled to support himself with his writing. To survive, he lived frugally from a family inheritance and the little he had spare he would use to send letters and submissions. In his later life, he separated from his wife and moved in with an elderly aunt.
Lovecraft died after a short battle with cancer in 1937 and it was not until the sixties that the horror master began to get the credit he deserved. He may not have lived to see how popular his work became, but we like to think that he is somewhere with The Great Old Ones watching our world.

John Kennedy Toole
It was a bittersweet moment when A Confederacy of Dunces won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981. That was because twelve years prior to the awards win, the author John Kennedy Toole had committed suicide.
The book told the story of Ignatius J. Reilly, a modern day Don Quixote who goes on a journey through the underside of New Orleans. Reilly and those he came across were the ultimate outsiders and Toole was an outlier much like the characters he created.
He wrote two novels in his lifetime. The aforementioned A Confederacy Of Dunces and The Neon Bible, which would be published later after the success of his first novel. While he was alive, however, it was the failure to get his work published that saw Toole slip into a state of paranoia and depression that eventually drove him to suicide at the age of 31.