The trustee of a literary estate has a tough job. Be too free with a dead writer’s copyrights and you may wind up with Arthur Rimbaud novelty items; act too quickly to burn materials, as Emily Dickinson’s sister and James Joyce’s grandson did, and you could distort a legacy. According to The Guardian, Ian Fleming’s estate is “the gold standard,” keeping the James Bond franchise happily and lucratively thrumming along since the author’s death in 1964. But in its profitability and harmony, it’s an outlier.

When it comes to biographers seeking permission to quote from work and from personal letters, executors have to do a delicate dance—in The Silent Woman, her book about the various biographies of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Janet Malcolm called letters “the fossils of feeling.” Different heirs take different tacks: James Baldwin’s family continues to restrict access to those fossils, possibly out of discomfort with his sexuality. Conversely, John Cheever’s family made his explicit love letters public.

My new book, Also a Poet, while primarily a memoir built around my father’s and my shared love of the poet Frank O’Hara, is also about my experience with the O’Hara estate, which did not support my father’s attempts to write an O’Hara biography 40 years ago, or mine now. In spite of extensive work on the book, including recorded interviews with O’Hara from the late ’70s, my father never finished it. In figuring out why, I wound up encountering the same resistance.

The obstacles my father and I faced in trying to unearth the private life of a beloved, deceased literary figure are far from unique. These seven books cast light on the dramatic tension between literary estates and the biographers who, depending on your point of view, are either vultures picking at a corpse or heroes rescuing their subject from oblivion.

Harcourt

The Executor: A Comedy of Letters, by Michael Krüger, translated by John Hargraves

“A helpless, clueless executor” is put in charge of his old friend’s wild estate, full of rowdy pets and a chaotic assortment of books and papers. Amid the trove, he expects to find a final novel, long promised, called The Testament, which was intended to be a “prodigious glowing meteor” of a final book, “the world’s last novel.” What he finds instead doesn’t make sense for a time, and he’s blindsided by papers that he believes reflect badly on the dead author. While seeking to protect his friend’s reputation, the executor makes choices about what to keep and what to suppress that the book’s final pages reveal to be less than ideal. In his entertaining novel, Krüger drives home the point that managing a dead person’s effects is hard, and that even the most well-meaning efforts to burnish a figure’s legacy can backfire.

Penguin Classics

The Aspern Papers, by Henry James

Start working on a literary biography and someone is sure to mention to you this lively anti-biography touchstone about an American editor who wheedles his way into a household, hoping to get access to the papers of a dead Romantic poet named Jeffrey Aspern. Under an assumed identity, the protagonist tries to ingratiate himself with Aspern’s widow and daughter, and in the course of the ruse acts abominably. He seduces the daughter, “Miss Tina,” who shows her own capacity for bad behavior by using her leverage to try to get him to marry her. James’s inspiration for the novella, per his own 1908 preface, was a story he’d heard in Italy about efforts to retrieve letters sent by Percy Bysshe Shelley to Claire Clairmont, the stepsister of Percy’s wife, Mary Shelley, and the lover of Lord Byron. The book suggests that coveted literary estates can be as corrupting as Gollum’s ring—for biographers and executors both.

[Read: Make way for literary tourism]

Counterpoint Press

My Father Is a Book, by Janna Malamud Smith

When Smith’s father, the novelist Bernard Malamud, died, she, her mother, and her brother were stuck trying to figure out what they owed to whom. In a 1989 New York Times essay considering how much to share of her father’s private papers, Smith noted that one reason novelists’ relatives can be annoyed by biographers’ requests is that they’ve likely already had to deal with their lives being mined to some extent by the writer in their family. In 1997, Smith wrote a book further arguing for privacy, Private Matters: In Defense of the Personal Life. But in 2006, after preventing others from writing biographies about him, she wrote her own book about her father. In it, she talks about his affair with a student, as well as her parents’ close and not entirely monogamous marriage. In the preface of My Father Is a Book, she writes, “How do I justify my own change of heart? I’m not sure I can. In part I have to laugh at myself: When I finally read the notebooks, I realized their content didn’t need my protection.” Later, she, her brother, and her mother collaborated with the writer Philip Davis on an official biography. The story is a good reminder that ultimately a legacy in the hands of an author’s family is likely to wind up subject to not just the wishes of the deceased but also the conflicted motivations and emotions of their living relatives.

St. Martin’s Griffin

Another Side of Bob Dylan: A Personal History on the Road and off the Tracks, by Victor and Jacob Maymudes

Formally, this book is the closest I’ve encountered to my own. Jacob Maymudes found cassettes recorded by his father, Victor, a friend of Bob Dylan’s (not the owner of a purely literary estate, though of course it was enough of one for the Nobel committee to award Dylan the 2016 prize in literature), and put together a hybrid memoir-biography that evades the need to quote from the central figure’s work. There is even, as in my book, a devastating house fire. Victor and Dylan met in their 20s in the Village and bonded over music and politics. They had a falling out, however, and Dylan did not talk in depth about Victor in his own memoir. But Jacob isn’t writing about Dylan; instead, he’s writing around him. Saving no doubt a small fortune in permissions fees, Jacob quotes not from Dylan’s work but from poems by his own father, including “LSD”: “Well I rolled out of bed / sat on my head / didn’t know if I was alive or dead / staggered to the door but fell to the floor.” In what struck me as a poignant attempt to put a positive spin on the absence, Jacob says of his father’s poetry, “The text looks similar to the way Bob types his text.”

[Read: Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize isn't about music]

Faber

In Search of J. D. Salinger, by Ian Hamilton

Ian Hamilton’s would-be biography of Salinger turned into an intermittently fascinating, if bitter, account of the quest to write the book against the still-living author’s wishes, and then about the 1986 legal action Salinger brought—successfully—against him as a result. Hamilton grapples throughout with the ethics of his endeavor, setting ground rules for himself and rather annoyingly referring to his “biographizing alter ego” in the third person. He asks, “At what point does decent curiosity become indecent?” And he confesses to caring about the answer to that question, but not too much: “This circular self-questioning … was genuine; it felt genuine. But it didn’t seem to be actually stopping me from moving on to the next stage of the operation.” Hamilton followed up this work with Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography, an anecdote-dense book about a dozen fraught estates, including those of John Donne and Robert Louis Stevenson. His attitude toward what writers leave behind is bold, bordering on petulant, and reading about how he got his comeuppance will benefit any bright-eyed scholar sure that a research project will go great.

Vintage

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, by Janet Malcolm

Janet Malcolm’s meta-biography about Sylvia Plath remains the go-to nonfiction book about the dueling motivations of biographers and descendants. She looks at the levels of literary merit and invasiveness in the various Plath biographies, interviewing her biographers and people connected with Plath. Malcolm’s consistent take on writer-as-bad-actor shows up in The Silent Woman: She compares the biographer to “the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing the loot away.” In a world defined by formal requests and politics, Malcolm’s bomb-throwing is refreshing. One update worth noting when it comes to Plath: More loot is out in the open than there once was. The biographer Heather Clark, who wrote the 2020 thousand-page biography Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, has said that she was able to make use of material others hadn’t when control of the estate shifted away from Plath’s sister-in-law, Olywn Hughes, who was famously hostile to Plath, and was granted to Plath’s daughter, Frieda Hughes. Clark’s was the first major book to make use of the archive under new management—and she mentioned in at least one podcast interview that Frieda liked it.

[Read: The haunting last letters of Sylvia Plath]

Vintage

The Shadow in the Garden, by James Atlas

For a nuanced contrast to Malcolm’s cynicism, this book Atlas published just a couple of years before he passed away in 2019, praised by such legendary biographers as Ron Chernow, is an excellent option. Atlas looks at the emotional push-pull of writing about others’ lives, including conflicted feelings about his own biography of Saul Bellow, who called biographers “the shadow of the tombstone in the garden.” What might be the most moving rebuttal to Malcolm’s “burglar” portrait of the biographer is his account of trying to be fair and empathetic in his work. Upon receiving access to the papers of Delmore Schwartz (thoughtfully stewarded by his old friend, the critic Dwight Macdonald), Atlas describes skimming the pages, finding treasures from W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot, among others, that would delight any literary biographer. But as he leaves the library, what he most looks forward to, he writes, is spending “long days in the company of someone I had never met but would come to know better than anyone else in the world.”

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In 1893, Henry James complained about the recent publication of Gustave Flaubert’s letters. The French novelist was famous for his stylistic perfectionism. What treachery, then, to publish his casual missives, ones that he hadn’t had time to labor over. To James’s regret, the new collection left Flaubert’s “every weakness exposed, every mystery dispelled, every secret betrayed.”

James understood why the book existed. As he wrote, humans possess “an insurmountable desire to know.” When we love someone—a writer, a friend, a mistress—we want to know everything about them; when we hate someone, we want to know everything about them too. This desire applies to more than people: We start a novel and need to know how it ends; we feel a pain in our chest and head over to WebMD to determine its cause.

If the desire to know is insurmountable, so too are the consequences. Many books, including ones by James himself, dramatize the dangers of knowledge. (Adam and Eve, meet apple.) Perhaps more interesting, though, are those books that envision the joys, even the wisdom, of what the essayist Emily Ogden calls “unknowing.” We yearn for revelation and epiphany. But what if, Ogden asks in her book On Not Knowing, we refused this desire for certainty? What if instead we cultivated “a capacity to hold the position of not knowing yet—possibly of not knowing ever?”

Here are some books that suggest the exhilarating, if difficult, gifts of not knowing—what it means to remain open to that which is beyond the self, to the experience of beauty and wonder, to the strangeness of others and the world.

University of Chicago Press

On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays, by Emily Ogden

In this collection of short, blazing essays, Ogden is interested in experiences—giving birth to a child, reading a poem, having a one-night stand—that don’t lead to final and clarifying knowledge. This zone of the in-between, where we lack both total ignorance and absolute knowledge, has its own virtues, she argues: flexibility, humility, wonder, playfulness. Ogden’s essays follow a train of thought for a bit, then drop it only to return to it in a different key. At one point, she praises “riffing” in music but also in prose, where one begins by “starting with a single idea and putting it through a series of changes, embellishing it, making it more and more elaborate and even absurd.” Her essays riff in precisely this way. They try things out; they don’t begin with a point but provisionally approach one through the writing itself. Right now, our political and aesthetic discourse seems less a genuine conversation than a competition of mutually exclusive certainties. How wonderful it is to read Ogden, a writer who says that “the question mark’s business with me will never be finished” and means it.

Penguin Classics

Washington Square, by Henry James

Though every James novel is a drama of knowledge, Washington Square presents us with the romance of unknowing. In this early tale, the meek but rich Catherine Sloper, a girl with a “plain, dull, gentle countenance,” falls for the charismatic but poor scoundrel Morris Townsend. She hopes that Morris loves her, too, that his interest is motivated not by financial concerns but by passion. Because she believes that she might be adored, because she doesn’t know that she isn’t, Catherine becomes worthy of the love she hopes for. Her beauty increases; her will strengthens; she turns into a true heroine. She’s wrong about Morris’s nature, of course, and the novel ends in devastating fashion. Yet for that brief moment, Catherine was transformed. Hope allowed Catherine to thrive; the desolation of knowledge leads to her spiritual death. Despite the consequences that may come, it’s far better, James suggests, to live in a fiction—far more beautiful, far nobler—than to live within the harshness of reality. In Washington Square, uncertainty is another word for possibility.

[Read: Mount St. Helens and the fear of not knowing]

Vintage

Shadow and Act, by Ralph Ellison

This might seem an odd choice, because one emerges from this essay collection admiring just how much Ellison knows: 19th-century American fiction, ancient folklore, contemporary jazz. Yet each essay suggests that critics should approach their task with fundamental openness—with a mind that knows that it doesn’t know. Critics often misread Black fiction, Ellison argues, because they confidently see it as a monolith, an unrelenting stream of pain and humiliation, when it’s actually quite varied. Sociological approaches to literature misfire, he contends, because they “would rather kill a novel than modify their presumptions concerning a given reality.” For Ellison, presumption is the gravest of critical sins, and humility the greatest of critical virtues. All serious writers, he argues, “begin their careers in play and puzzlement.” Critics do, too, and Shadow and Act shows us a strong critic at his strongest.

Harper

Holy the Firm, by Annie Dillard

“It is November 19 and no wind, and no hope of heaven, and no wish for heaven, since the meanest of people show more mercy than hounding and terrorist gods.” So writes Annie Dillard after describing a plane crash—real or imagined, the reader isn’t sure—that has left a 7-year-old girl named Julie Norwich with her face burned off. In this unclassifiable book (is it prose poetry? philosophy? memoir? fiction?) Dillard worries, with anguish and ferocity, over the problem of suffering. Whatever else it is, Holy the Firm is a work of theodicy: a consideration of how, if the world is created by a benevolent God, pain and other evils can exist. Like most works of its kind (or at least the good ones), Holy the Firm argues that knowledge of divine providence is impossible—and that the pursuit of such knowledge is itself harmful. Care, not certainty, is what is required; justifying the ways of God to men distracts us from the real task at hand. “We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all,” Dillard writes. We’ll never discern why planes crash or fires burn. Our business is not to know but to love.

Vintage

Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany

This book is unknowing all the way down. Delany’s science-fiction classic takes place in the aftermath of an mysterious catastrophe. A fire, or a bomb, or a plague, or something else altogether, has struck the American city of Bellona. (Where is Bellona? Similarly unclear.) At the novel’s center is the Kid (sometimes called “Kid,” sometimes “Kidd”). He’s a wanderer who doesn’t know his name, or his age, or what he’s doing in “a city of inner discordances and retinal distortions” where the geography shifts daily, where time “leaks; sloshes backwards and forwards,” where sexuality is fluid and meaning unstable. Science fiction regularly exposes us to what isn’t yet known. Delany exposes us to what can never be known. This relentless estrangement starts off as frustrating but ends as clarifying: When language, plot, and character don’t work as they typically do, we come to see them with greater truth. As William Gibson writes in his foreword, “To enter Dhalgren is to be progressively stripped of various certainties.” Dhalgren demands that you become a different kind of reader: less rigid, more limber, responsive to rather than repelled by strangeness.

[Listen: How to know that you know nothing]

Mariner

The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald

The Blue Flower offers a fictionalized account of the life of the 18th-century German Romantic poet and philosopher Friedrich von Hardenberg. (He published under the name Novalis; in the novel, he goes by the decidedly less Romantic-sounding Fritz.) Fitzgerald’s historical details locate us with great specificity: Fritz reads both Franz Ludwig Cancrinus’s Foundations of Mining and Saltworks, Volume 1, and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. This grounding in history makes the book’s marvels only more luminous. It’s a text filled with dreams and visions, where transfiguration—a lowly girl or a household object suddenly becomes radiant, ghostly, strange—is always imminent but never fully understood. The novel centers on two different mysteries. Fritz inexplicably falls in love with a plain young girl named Sophie, and he has a vision of an otherworldly blue flower and begins writing a story about it. Fritz can’t explain why he loves the unremarkable Sophie or what the beautiful flower means. He just knows that he’s called to them, and that this calling has to do with their incomprehensibility. Love is unreasonable, and beauty refuses to be contained or fully known. These are the lessons of Romanticism and of Fitzgerald’s short, perfect novel.

Simon & Schuster

In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead. by James Lee Burke

Detective fiction, by definition, might seem to move from ignorance to knowledge. You start by wondering, Whodunit? Once that question is answered, the novel is over and you’re satisfied. But by the end of the sixth James Lee Burke novel featuring the God-haunted, po’boy-loving Louisiana detective Dave Robicheaux, things are still confused. The book fires up the engine of plot early. A woman’s body is found “at the bottom of a coulee”; another body is discovered wrapped in chains in a nearby marsh; Dave starts having visions of a troop of Confederate soldiers. After the murders are solved, Dave still doesn’t know many things—were his visions real? What evil lives in the souls of men?—and neither does the reader. Dave is a good detective because he’s attuned to that which exceeds reason; Burke is a great writer because he makes us see that mysteries that remain mysteries provide their own kind of pleasure.

[Read: David Lynch’s unfathomable masterpiece]

Coffee House Press

Jawbone, by Mónica Ojeda, translated by Sarah Booker

This novel of horror and desire considers, in Ojeda’s words, “the vertigo of what’s unexplored.” Some bored teenagers enrolled at a strict Catholic school in Ecuador begin hanging out in an abandoned building. They egg one another on to greater and greater dares—some silly, some sexual. They begin swapping scary stories, drawing from and expanding upon “creepypastas”—urban legends and spooky tales found on the internet. Most dramatically, they imagine, and then worship, a deity they dub the White God: a divine figure who terrifies and attracts precisely because of its blank ineffability. Ojeda’s teenage girls are told that they’re irrational, baffling, even monstrous. Her characters don’t apologize for the urges they can’t explain or the bodily changes they can’t understand. Rather, they turn this inscrutability into a form of power. You’re scared of our bodies? they seem to ask. Very well. We’ll celebrate them, constructing a theology “composed of all the things you cannot even imagine.”

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