Jonathan Franzen told the New York Times this week that his next novel might be his final bow. “Somehow [it] does feel like my last,” said Franzen, who turns 60 next year. But this week, he also told the Guardian that he doesn’t “ever plan to retire”. His partner points out in the New York Times interview that he previously talked of both Freedom and Purity as valedictory outings – so perhaps he is joining the ranks of writers who have said they were finished only to return.

They form an illustrious bunch, these authors who “retire” and then renege on that announcement, but one not short of members with commercial clout. Stephen King, currently back in the bestseller lists and seemingly averaging two or three titles a year, declared that he was “done with books” when he ostensibly stropped off back in 2002. Maeve Binchy, another sales banker for publishers, risked ruling out a comeback (“I’m not a Frank Sinatra person”) when she hung up her pen in 2000 after Scarlet Feather, but turned out several more novels.

Maeve Binchy hung up her pen in 2000. Photograph: Geoff Wilkinson/Rex Features

While King and Binchy may have chafed at the book-a-year demands of commercial publishing, exhausted literary novelists are the most frequent non-retiring retirees. Seven years before her Nobel win, Alice Munro, the short story specialist, said she was finished. No less fatigued was Anne Tyler, who said “I want to not ever finish a book again” a year or so before A Spool of Blue Thread came out and was picked for the 2015 Man Booker shortlist.

Some authors do indeed stop (Philip Roth, for example) or stop publishing their work while continuing to write (JD Salinger); others definitively cease to produce work in a certain genre – TS Eliot quitting poetry, Herman Melville quitting the novel – and switch to another instead.

So many authors in recent years have talked of “last books” that it’s hard to suspend disbelief. Especially quick to un-retire was Jim Crace, who talked repeatedly of looking forward to freedom and of Harvest as his farewell as it advanced towards the Man Booker shortlist (it was the bookies’s favourite), but realised he was wrong to want “a divorce from writing”. Perhaps publishers shouldn’t plan a collected Franzen edition just yet.