Every writer dreams of leaving a literary legacy that will last longer than they do. But probably, if they got to choose, they would want to enjoy at least some of it before they died. After all, what use is it to Franz Kafka that we all still talk about him in 2018? Not a lot, I’d wager. He probably would have appreciated those book sales during his lifetime. So as a warning, or as a comfort, fully depending on how morbid you are, here are ten writers whose best work (acknowledging that “best” is subjective, and in some cases worth debating) was published after their death. Eat your veggies, writers, lest this happen to you. Or just rest easy with that big steak over there, in the hope that even after death, your hopes of literary fame may not be entirely quashed.

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Manuscripts may not burn—but they do get buried. Bulgakov died in 1940, and his masterpiece didn’t see the light of day until 1973. Well, not all of it, anyway: a censored version was serialized in Moscow magazine beginning in 1966, and then published as a single volume in 1967, and the slightly more complete samizdat version was published in 1969, but it wasn’t until 1973 that this hilarious, monstrous beauty showed itself in full form.

Sylvia Plath, Ariel

The Bell Jar was published during Plath’s life—barely—but that hardly matters, because while the novel is good, poetry was Plath’s real area of brilliance, and Ariel, despite Ted Hughes’s meddling, is a nearly perfect book. Ariel was only the first of seven volumes of poetry to be published after Plath’s death (including the restored edition in 2004); in 1982, she won a posthumous Pultizer prize for her Collected Poems. (That’s not even counting all the letters and ephemera and their attendant bikini-controversies.) We may not really know the full extent of the fuckery Hughes got up to with his more-talented wife’s legacy, but we can still appreciate what we’ve got.

John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

Well, speaking of Pulitzer prizes. After John Kennedy Toole’s suicide at the age of 31, his mother found a carbon copy of a manuscript for a novel in one of his drawers. She tried for years to get it published, but was turned away by everyone she contacted, except (eventually) the writer and professor Walker Percy. She showed up at his office, manuscript in hand. He felt forced to read it. But then—well, he loved it. A Confederacy of Dunces was published in 1980, eleven years after Toole’s suicide, and won the Pulitzer prize in fiction the next year.

Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson Legendary recluse and star baker Emily Dickinson had almost no poems published in her lifetime, despite the fact that she wrote over two thousand of them. It wasn’t until after her death in 1886 that her sister Lavinia—instructed to destroy her correspondence, but with no instructions on the poetry—began to try to get them published. A heavily edited version came out in 1890, followed by many volumes and editions, but it wasn’t until 1955 that Thomas H. Johnson published this complete and correct collection of Dickinson’s many mini-masterpieces.