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This week's question: Where are all these long-lost manuscripts coming from?

It seems it no longer matters if your favorite authors are dead or retired — their work just keeps on coming. 

Recent years have seen a flood of original manuscripts rising from obscurity. "Lost" works by Edith Wharton, Charlotte Bronte, Truman Capote, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others have all surfaced. 

The biggest literary sensation of 2015 was Harper Lee's "Go Set a Watchman," which spent decades in the family vault before it was "rediscovered" by the family lawyer. (The exact circumstances of this discovery 

. Notably, Lee is the only author in this trend that's still alive.)

The latest literary discovery is the children's book, 

 from Beatrix Potter, who died in 1943. An enterprising publisher tracked in down in the archives of a London museum, and it will be published this September.

So what's behind the trend? A lot of research. Most of the rediscovered manuscripts were housed in library or museum archives, where scholars have sorted through acres of paper to find them. 

The question of intent, however, becomes difficult when an author has been dead for ten, 20 or 100 years. Did they 

 these pieces to be published? Can anyone be sure? 

The public's growing taste for "never-before-seen" literary treasures keeps driving the hunt, but when it turns up work that authors never finished polishing, does it tarnish their reputation?

Below are a few of the recently rediscovered works.

A postdoctoral fellow at Oxford stumbled across a previously unknown work by Wharton while researching World War I in Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It was nine pages long, and it had been cut and pasted together with extensive annotations.

The story centers on Parisian society as it weathers the war. You can read it in full on 

Another Ivy archive, another lost manuscript: Andrew Gulli, the managing editor of The Strand literary magazine, 

 "Temperature" in Princeton's archive. The Strand published it for the first time last year.

The 8,000-word story was written in 1939, and carries some arguably autobiographical elements for Fitzgerald: It tells the story of a hard-drinking writer in declining health.

Gulli is something of an expert at finding such manuscripts: Two years ago, he found an unpublished story by John Steinbeck. He also 

, saying he had found "something by a very, very famous writer of detective stories," but had not yet worked out the legal terms to publish it.

Seuss fans got another taste of the legend's wit and whimsy in 2015 when "What Pet Should I Get?" hit bookstores. 

Though Seuss, whose real name was Theodor Giesel, died in 1991, he left behind a partially completed manuscript and sketches.

An unpublished short story from Charlotte Bronte

As a teenager, Charlotte Bronte dreamed up a fantasy world called Angria and wrote miniature stories about it. (The stories were literally miniature; she wrote them on paper the size of a matchbook.)  

A new short story and a poem about Angria surfaced last November, tucked into the pages of a book that belonged to Bronte's mother, Maria. The Bronte Society recently acquired the book at auction and is making the newly discovered work available to the public. 

The collections manager at the Bronte Parsonage Museum told 

 the book "was clearly well-used and of great sentimental value to the Brontë children, who lost their mother while they were very young. In addition, the unpublished writings by Charlotte offer new opportunities for research, which is really exciting."

It was rumored that Truman Capote had an unfinished manuscript in his possession when he died in 1984. His editor searched his papers for it, but never found it. At Capote's request, the papers were then donated to the New York Public Library.

In 2013, an editor combing through the papers found not the manuscript, but some of Capote's earlier writings, from his teens and 20s.

"Aside from those that had been published in Capote's high school literary magazine, none of the stories had seen print," according to the 

The stories were published in a collection, for the first time, last October.

The next secret manuscript to surface may well belong to the notoriously private J.D. Salinger, who died in 2010. 

In 2013, the co-authors of the biography "Salinger" claimed that a novel, a novella and several short stories by Salinger would be published beginning 2015. That deadline has come and gone, but it's likely the stories of the Glass family and Holden Caulfield aren't over yet.  

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Truman Capote. Beatrix Potter. Edith Wharton. Dr. Seuss. In the literary world, being dead doesn't mean you're done publishing.

Where do these 'long-lost' manuscripts keep coming from?

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