Comments on: 9 Unfinished Novels by Great Writers

By: Nick

Nick — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 15:21:14 +0000

No Two Gates to the City by Shelby Foote?

By: Rui Manuel Amaral

Rui Manuel Amaral — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 22:30:57 +0000

And “The Book of Disquiet” by Bernardo Soares (Fernando Pessoa).

By: Maris

Maris — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 15:07:05 +0000

Don’t forget The Virgin and the Gipsy by D.H. Lawrence.

By: Hershel Parker

Hershel Parker — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 14:30:27 +0000

Can the moderator delete one of the duplicate messages about incomplete works being mentioned in HM’s late NYC years? Sorry!

By: Hershel Parker

Hershel Parker — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 13:58:32 +0000

A few examples of the topic in U.S. newspapers in HM’s last years:
As trans-Atlantic and then trans-continental communication speeded up in the last third of the nineteenth-century, newspapers and magazines spread stories of works left uncompleted faster than had ever been done. For years after Dickens’s death in 1870 his unfinished Edwin Drood was in the news: Wilkie Collins was or was not going to finish it; the piratical Walter Stephens impudently had staged a version in London (1871); the British-born New York journalist Frank Leslie had copyrighted a completed version (1871); a young businessman in Brattleboro was said to have completed the book under “‘spiritual’ dictation” from Dickens (1873). Newspapers recorded that in 1872 the New York statesman William H. Seward left unfinished his history of his life and times; Felix Mendelssohn’s unfinished oratorio Christus, was performed in Boston in 1874); in 1876 John Forster died with only one volume of his projected life of Swift in print.

By: Club Stephen King

Club Stephen King — Sun, 16 Sep 2012 11:25:46 +0000

Stephen King do not only have 1 unfinished novel… but MANY.

Rocky Wood, researcher & expert es Stephen King created a book “Stephen King : uncollected, unpublished” about this.
Moreover, Stephen King often restart working on old projects. ie : Under the Dome & many others…

By: Hershel Parker

Hershel Parker — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 13:54:51 +0000

Thank you for acknowledging the category of The Incomplete. No incompletion’s heaven ordained, Melville said, but he was stirred, maybe even “haunted” (certainly remembering over decades) by Wordsworth’s lines in “Malham Cove” about the sadness of things incomplete and purposes betrayed. I recently noticed that a blogger friend of mine had referred to me as thinking BILLY BUDD was incoherent. No, I explained, I would apply the test of coherence only to a completed work, not to one left incomplete and going off in two quite different directions. It’s incomplete, as you agree, so formal New Critical coherence is not to be looked for. That out of the way, the manuscript that came close to being a finished work gives us much to think about and to talk about in class. Thank you again for calling attention to this topic. It was, by the way, a persistent topic in U. S. newspapers in the last half of the nineteenth-century, when Melville was working on CLAREL and BILLY BUDD.

By: Ted Knight

Ted Knight — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 20:33:58 +0000

What about Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood?