Thread by @HeerJeet

1. Once an author writes a book it might belong to them in terms of copyright but it also belongs to the world as a creation. But some writers try to self-cancel. Some thoughts on this with reference to Rosemary Tonks, Sidney Hook, Kafka, Virgil, Seuss, James Gould Cozzens, etc.

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1368202799935332352

2. Part of the frustration with the cloddish Dr. Seuss discourse is that what is clearly an attempt by estate to do brand management got recast in cultural war terms. But authors do brand management all the time by selecting what to put out into world & what to keep in print.

3. Seuss himself engaged in brand management by not keeping in print such now embarrassing juvenilia as "Boners: By Those Who Pull Them" and "The Pocket Book of Boners."

4. This is Rosemary Tonks (1928-2014), poet and novelist. In the 1960s/1970s she wrote witty social comedies: think Firbanks or Waugh against a swinging London background. Then she had a religious conversion and renounced her work.

5. Tonks not only let her works fall out of print, but would also go into used book stores and buy up old copies and destroy them. Her work is now exceedingly rare.

6. Sidney Hook wrote too of the very best expositions of Karl Marx ever: Towards The Understanding of Karl Marx (1933) & From Hegel to Marx (1936). Then when he became a Cold Warrior forbade the republication of these excellent books.

7. It took years for Hooks' reluctant estate to agree to a republication of Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx. For many years it was available only in a samizdat version.

8. Even Stephen King has taken a book out of circulation! King's friend Harlan Ellison had a few early books he was embarrassed by. Not only would they not be kept in print, if a fan offered them to be signed Ellison would rip them up!

https://twitter.com/mattkeeley/status/1368983687715557382

9. James Gould Cozzens regarded first three or four novels as an embarrassment and when he became a bestseller in 1950s refused to let them be reprinted. True also of many other writers, notably Mordecai Richler.

10. Virgil wanted the Aeneid(which he was still working on) to be destroyed. Most of the Kafka canon is works that were unpublished while he was alive which he wanted his executor to destroy. Fortunately, neither was listened to.

11. If you read Kafka's oeuvre, you are doing so in violation of his will. There's no easy answers here: what should be preserved is always going to be a contest between writers, estates, and the reading public. Hard to find a solution to please everyone.

12. One takeaway is that despite the culture war certainties offered in the Seuss debate, we're dealing with a complex area of competing just clams. I think looser copyright after writer's death helps sort some of this out by removing a veto point.

13. Tangentially, this is another place where the cancel culture hysteria, if it were based on what it claims to be, would look to policy solutions rather than performative outrage.

https://twitter.com/alex_shephard/status/1368992283782176777