As a young woman, Zora Neale Hurston was a leading light of the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of African American literature and art that took place in New York City in the 1920s and ’30s. She wrote plays, short stories, novels, and essays but never received much money for her work. Her last novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, appeared in 1948 but later novels were rejected. She worked as a maid and librarian to make ends meet, and when she died in 1960, she was buried in an unmarked grave. Her work would be rediscovered in the 1970s, thanks largely to the efforts of author Alice Walker.

After abortive attempts at being an art dealer, a teacher, and a missionary, Vincent van Gogh took up art in 1880. By 1888, he had synthesized such disparate influences as French Impressionism, Japanese woodblock prints, and the paintings of Rubens into a distinctive style. However, he was haunted by depression and died by suicide in July 1890. He painted more than 800 canvases, and only one, The Red Vineyard (1888), sold in his lifetime. However, shortly after his death, exhibitions of his works began to be mounted, and his reputation slowly grew.

A photographer, Surrealist artist and model, Lee Miller might have been known primarily as the muse and lover of the Surrealist artist Man Ray had her son, Antony Penrose, not discovered and promoted her exceptional work as a fashion and war photographer and recovered her reputation as an artist in her own right. After Miller died of cancer in 1977, Penrose and his wife discovered some 60,000 negatives, 20,000 prints and contact sheets, documents and writing boxed up in an attic—and publicized what they found.