Being mythological does wonders for one's ego.

"When a major work by a major writer is published posthumously, no one bats an eye," Margaret Atwood wrote in January 1979,

Minor works by minor writers presumably don't get published until the author has been dead long enough to have become quaint. "Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams" is a minor work by a major writer, and it's the contrast that causes niggling. Whom does such a publication benefit? Not the author, and not the author's reputation, which is doing very well without it. Not the general reader hitherto innocent of the Sylvia Plath opus and myth who may stumble upon it and wonder what all the shouting is about. [...] I have to admit at the outset that this kind of publication makes me uneasy by definition, hinting as it does of [rummagings] in bureau drawers that the author, had she lived, would doubtless have kept firmly locked. What writer of sane mind would willingly give to the world her undergraduate short stories, her disgruntled jottings on the doings of unpleasant neighbors, her embarrassing attempts to write formula magazine fiction?

To an extent I agree with her: I too am uncomfortable with posthumously published works, such as the bulk of Franz Kafka's writing (he asked for it to be burned after his death, but the friend to whom he entrusted this task, Max Brod, broke the promise and instead published it), Plath's complete diaries* (which she did not intend for public consumption, unlike, say, Anne Frank), or Män som hatar kvinnor (which was unfinished at the time of Stieg Larsson's death and thus presents the audience with a very different portrait of the author than we would have seen had he finished the manuscript). However, where Atwood and I differ is in regards to the quality of the short stories. Labelling Johnny Panic as "a minor work by a major writer" does Plath's prose a great disservice.

*Sylvia Plath's diaries were originally published in 1982 in a heavily abridged version authorised by her husband, Ted Hughes. Ironically, Plath wrote in her diaries upon her first meeting with Hughes that she felt their relationship would lead to her death.