Last Works

Every writer eventually faces the question: Is there anything left to say?

By Roger Grenier - The American Scholar

Translated by Alice Kaplan

Is the final work of a writer—or for that matter of any artist—final according to the writer, or final for everyone else? Few writers have willingly put their last word to paper. Few have composed the literary equivalent of a last will and testament. Most of the time, the creator comes up dry.
Joseph Conrad, who died on August 3, 1924, wrote to André Gide two months earlier: “It’s been almost four years since I’ve done anything decent. I wonder if this is the end?”

William Faulkner confessed, “I know now that I am getting toward the end, the bottom of the barrel.”
There are those who have nothing left to say, but also those on whom the ax falls, who die making plans. In Saint Petersburg, I saw the desk where Dostoyevsky finished writing The Brothers Karamazov. “I stay at my table and I write literally day and night,” he declared as he was writing Book XX and the epilogue. The novel was published in December 1880. He thought of a sequel, but he died on January 28. Just behind the desk is a dark couch. Dostoyevsky died on this couch. The desk and the couch, inseparable.


Many writers are not aware that their time to live, and so to create, has expired. Tolstoy never stopped accumulating notes, projects, drafts—then he fled home to die in an out-of-the-way train station.

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