literary executor

noun

1. a person entrusted with the publishable works and other papers of a deceased author.

Word History and Origins

Origin of literary executor¹

First recorded in 1865–70

Example Sentences

His friend and literary executor, Max Brod, had been entrusted to burn all of Kafka’s letters and manuscripts after his death — a wish Kafka put in writing, even though Brod told him he wouldn’t do it.

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“Through her illness she had me bring her notebooks to the hospital as thoughts and words came to her,” said her friend and literary executor Michael Faucette.

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Revised further by her ex-husband and literary executor, Robert Nemiroff, after her death, it has returned to Broadway, at the James Earl Jones Theater, with Oscar Isaac in the title role of a bloviating, early ’60s Greenwich Village intellectual.

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Theo Downes-Le Guin, the son of and literary executor for Le Guin, the science fiction writer, was surprised when he got an email from a publisher late last year asking for permission to make changes to her children’s series “Catwings.”

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Where his teacher had to seek subterfuge, Nugent, who died in 1987 at 81, could give fuller and freer expression to his identity — in the words of Thomas H. Wirth, his friend and literary executor, Nugent was “the first African American to write from a self-declared homosexual perspective.”

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