I’ll reap when I’m dead

J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings and now, 34 years after his death, The Children of Húrin. (Haywood Magee/Picture Post/Getty Images)

It’s shaping up as another stellar year for J.R.R. Tolkien — even if The Lord of the Rings musical tanks in London the way it did in Toronto. Tolkien has a new book out: The Children of Húrin. Granted, Tolkien’s son Christopher shepherded the novel along, but the fact that the British fantasy author has been dead for more than 30 years has been no impediment to his making the bestseller list again.

The Children of Húrin is not the only post-death triumph of ’07. Waitress, the directorial debut by the late Adrienne Shelly, was a darling at Sundance this year, where Fox Searchlight acquired distribution rights for $4 million US. (The film opens May 2.) Here are some of the biggest posthumous successes in pop culture — obscure artists who found fame after their demise or bona fide stars who refused to let death curtail their productivity.

Will Rogers

Living years: Famous for his wit, Will Rogers worked as a standup comedian (in the Ziegfield Follies), a syndicated humour columnist, a radio broadcaster and as a prolific actor; in pre-Second World War America, he was just about the biggest name in showbiz.
Died: Aug. 15, 1935 (plane crash)
Comeback: At the time of his death, 20th Century Fox was in possession of two completed but unreleased Rogers films: Steamboat ’Round the Bend and In Old Kentucky. The studio was uneasy about showing them, fearing audiences might find it in poor taste. When Fox finally did release the films later in 1935, audiences streamed to see them in a collective act of commemoration. In 1936, Fox re-released the Rogers film Dr. Bull (1933) to great profit.

James Dean. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

James Dean

Living years: James Dean had scored bit parts in Hollywood prior to 1955, but had no profile to speak of until he appeared that year in East of Eden, an adaptation of the John Steinbeck novel. Dean played the insecure scion of a First World War-era California farmer. Most critics agreed that his performance hinted at a great talent. Dean had wrapped up work on two other films before he…
Died: Sept. 30, 1955 (car crash)
Comeback: Posthumously, Dean appeared in Rebel Without a Cause, a 1955 film that would come to represent a generation of American teens. Dean’s complex performance — brooding, mumbling, vulnerable yet irreducibly cool — made him an avatar of disaffected youth. In 1956, Dean was seen as an oil prospector in the film Giant. He received posthumous Oscar nominations for both East of Eden and Giant. More significantly, his image became a fixture on bedroom walls the world over.

Emily Dickinson

Living years: The American poet Emily Dickinson was a textbook hermit who spent the bulk of her time scribbling bons mots in a notebook. During her lifetime, she published only 10 poems. (Is it any wonder she wrote one called I Am Nobody, Who Are You?)
Died: May 15, 1886 (natural causes)
Comeback: After her death, Dickinson’s family stumbled upon 40 hand-bound volumes containing more than 1,700 of her poems. 1,700! Trying to redress Dickinson’s obscurity, family members sent her poems to all manner of publishers. It wasn’t until the 20th century that Dickinson got her due, when she was acknowledged, alongside Walt Whitman, as one of the most important poets in American history.

John Kennedy Toole

Living years: Thwarted Louisiana novelist.
Died: March 26, 1969 (suicide)
Comeback: When Toole committed suicide in 1969 at the age of 31, he left two unpublished novels in his wake. One of them was a boisterous fugue called A Confederacy of Dunces. His mother took up his cause, campaigning tirelessly until the work was finally published in 1980. A Confederacy of Dunces won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981, has sold over one million copies in 30 languages and is rightly considered one of the finest comic novels ever written. (Toole’s other book, The Neon Bible, was published in 1989. It was adapted into a movie with Denis Leary in 1995 and inspired the title of the latest album by the Arcade Fire.)

Tom Thomson. (National Archives of Canada/Canadian Press)

Tom Thomson

Living years: The Ontario artist spent many years toiling as a graphic designer before finding a patron who could support his transition to painting full-time. It was during the period of 1913-1917 that Thomson created his most famous works — majestic oil paintings of the Canadian wilderness. He had only sporadic showings in galleries.
Died: July 8, 1917 (drowning)
Comeback: In 1918, Canada’s National Gallery bought The Jack Pine and Autumn’s Garland, along with 27 sketches. The Jack Pine was part of Canada’s contribution to the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in London in 1924, which brought Thomson worldwide notice. As a sign of the latent saleability of Thomson’s paintings, in November 2006, one of his works was snapped up for $934,000.

Ray Charles

Living years: One of the pivotal figures in 20th-century American music and the ultimate crossover artist, this pianist helped define rhythm and blues while also exploring jazz, country, gospel and unadulterated pop.
Died: June 10, 2004 (natural causes)
Comeback: August 2004 saw the release of Genius Loves Company, a duets album that paired Brother Ray with stars like Elton John, Diana Krall and Norah Jones. At the ensuing Grammy awards in 2005, Genius Loves Company won eight awards. (By any standard, a gratuitous haul.) In September of ’05, we got Genius & Friends — another duets album, this time culled from vocal collaborations he had done in the period 1997-05. The next fall, Concord Records released Ray Sings, Basie Swings. This disingenuous record sets Charles’ vocals from a 1973 performance to a new accompaniment by the Count Basie Orchestra (who are still touring 23 years after Basie’s death).

Jimi Hendrix. (Lipnitzki/Roger Viollet/Getty Images)

Jimi Hendrix

Living years: The creator of indelible psychedelic rock statements like Purple Haze, Foxy Lady and The Wind Cries Mary. His well-documented performance at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival leaves no doubt: Hendrix is the most incendiary guitarist ever.
Died: Sept. 18, 1970 (drug overdose)
Comeback: Hendrix was ridiculously prolific in the studio; given how much he recorded in his four-year burst of creativity, you almost wonder whether he saw the end coming. The first two posthumous records, The Cry of Love (1971) and War Heroes (1972), were whole albums of unreleased studio tracks. The Hendrix estate has proven a savvy lot: every decade since, they have OK’d 10 or so new albums — either new compilations of Jimi’s biggest tunes or collections of previously unreleased live material. And, by all accounts, the well is far from dry.

Zora Neale Hurston

Living years: Zora Neale Hurston was an essayist and novelist who, along with Langston Hughes, was a large force in the Harlem Renaissance, a group of artists who expressed the African-American experience in 1920s New York. Her most famous works include Mules and Men and the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Many of her contemporaries viewed her depiction of black slang dialogue as minstrelsy; while Richard Wright, author of Native Son, claimed her books were weightless and written for a white audience. The criticism greatly damaged Hurston’s career. In her final years, Hurston worked as a librarian and substitute teacher in Florida.
Died: Jan. 28, 1960 (stroke)
Comeback: At the time of her death, Hurston was buried in an unmarked grave. In the mid-’70s, writer Alice Walker was so shocked by this ignominious fact that she took to restoring Hurston’s battered reputation in American letters (as well as giving her a proper epitaph). The result was a cavalcade of new Hurston essay and short-story collections, as well as the first-ever production of Mule Bone, a play she had co-written with Hughes. In 2005, Oprah Winfrey produced a TV movie version of Their Eyes Were Watching God, starring Halle Berry.

Tupac Shakur. (Chi Modu/diverseimages/Getty Images)

Tupac Shakur

Living years: This controversial West Coast rap artist is best known for All Eyez on Me, one of the biggest-selling and most influential hip-hop albums of the ’90s; Tupac Shakur’s name is regularly bandied about in discussions of the best rapper ever. Shakur also nurtured an acting career, starring in Juice (1992) and Poetic Justice (1993).
Died: Sept. 13, 1996 (assassination)
Comeback: Having flirted with death while living — he survived an attempt on his life in 1994 — Tupac has been remarkably lively in death. Like Jimi Hendrix, Shakur was apparently inexhaustible in the studio. Six studio albums have been released posthumously, as well as a handful of compilations. (Comedian Dave Chappelle once did a hilarious satire of Tupac’s recorded output, addressing the alarming prescience of his lyrics.) As well, Shakur appeared posthumously in three films: Bullet, Gridlock’d and Gang Related. Live 2 Tell, a screenplay he penned while in prison in the mid-’90s, is slated for a film release in 2008. No word yet on whether Tupac will make a cameo.

Ernest Hemingway

Living years: Ernest (Papa) Hemingway was the author of American classics like A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea, which scored him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953. He took the Nobel Prize in Literature the following year.
Died: July 2, 1961 (suicide)
Comeback: Since his death, his estate has issued a litany of new titles, including the memoir A Moveable Feast (1964) and the novels Islands in the Stream (1970), The Garden of Eden (1986), True at First Light (1999) and Under Kilimanjaro (2005). Hey Papa, shall we pencil in another for 2011?

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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