SIR WALTER SCOTT: Terrifically popular in his day, Scott decided he should make money as the publisher as well as author of his own works. With that in mind he went into partnership with printer John Ballantyne and then with the publisher Archibald Constable. When Constable and Company went bankrupt after the great financial crash of 1825, Scott found himself in debt for over 100,000 pounds. It was a gigantic sum in those days. A man of great pride, Scott refused the aid of friends and set out at age 55 to pay off the debt by writing. Between 1826 and 1830 he worked at a tremendous pace and managed to pay off one-third of the debt before the exertion brought on a stroke. He was never the same and died two years later. Yet he finally reached his goal: after his death the sale of rights to his stories brought in enough cash to pay off all his debts.

ULYSSES S. GRANT: The great Civil War general also went broke late in life, thanks to an ill-advised investment in the Wall Street firm of Grant and Ward. (His son, Ulysses Jr., was a partner.) The firm went bankrupt, leaving Grant and his family deeply in debt. Grant determined to raise cash by writing his memoirs, a task which became more urgent when it became clear he had terminal cancer. Despite debilitating pain, Grant completed his memoirs in June of 1885. He died the next month. The memoirs were published posthumously and were a great success, paying off all of Grant's debts and setting up his widow Julia for the rest of her life.

MARK TWAIN: Oddly, the famous author played his own part in Grant's book. Grant's publisher was Charles L. Webster and Company, and Twain was a partner in that firm; like Scott, he had found publishing too lucrative to resist. Grant's memoirs were Webster's only great success, and the company went bankrupt ten years later. In an article on July 12, 1895, the New York Times reported that Twain "had lost all of his money trying to keep the firm solvent, and that in its failure he had lost everything." Twain, like Scott, vowed to pay off his debt in full. At age 60 he began a exhausting world lecture tour, travelling across America and on to Australia and Europe. By 1898 he had raised enough money to pay his debts dollar for dollar. Twain lived until 1910, but the strain of the bankruptcy (combined with the death of his wife, Olivia, in 1904) contributed to his rather gloomy outlook in the last decade of his life.

For more than thirty years, Polish mathematician NICOLAS COPERNICUS observed the skies and worked on his theory of planetary motion. He believed that the accepted geocentric theory, first conceived by Ptolemy nearly 1,500 years before, was just plain wrong, and that the planets -- including our own -- moved around the sun. Hesitant to publish his theories for fear of antagonizing the Catholic church, it wasn't until 1543, at the urging of the mathematician Rheticus (Georg Joachim von Lauchen), that his work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium was published. For years it was thought that Copernicus was on his deathbed before he saw the first copy, but now it is believed that the book was published a few weeks before his death, so it's likely he saw it then. Even so, it's clear that he died before the impact of his work could be fully appreciated.

ELIOT NESS isn't known as an author -- and he wasn't -- but his book The Untouchables made him famous (again) when it was published in 1957, a few months after his death. Ness had already been in the spotlight in the 1930s as a fiery federal agent who battled Chicago mobster Al Capone. More than two decades later, with the help of writer Oscar Frayley, Eliot re-told his story in an effort to earn a little cash after some failed business ventures. As the final manuscript was being prepared, Ness keeled over from a heart attack, dead at the age of 54.