In 1924, Franz Kafka asked his best friend to burn everything he had written.

Kafka was dying of tuberculosis in Vienna, unknown, unpublished, and convinced his work was a failure.

On his deathbed, he made a clear request to his closest friend, Max Brod: all manuscripts, notebooks, letters, and drafts were to be destroyed.

Brod refused.

He later said that he understood Kafka’s request perfectly... and ignored it anyway, because he believed Kafka did not understand the value of his own work.

After Kafka’s death, Brod published The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika.

Those books have since sold tens of millions of copies, long after Kafka was certain no one should ever read them..