Writers everywhere are appreciated for their longer writings. Novels outrank stories, vignettes outrank aphorisms, sonnets outrank haiku verses, and so on down the line. Sadly, even writers tend to succumb to this fallacy, which shares much with the defunct labor theory of value. The scarcity theory of value, long victorious in economics, applies to writers, to be sure, but not to their writings. To see the fallacy in plain light, only consider a great writer’s last words. The Chinese and Japanese alone recognize the death poem as a literary form. And a sublime one, too.