I grew up in the town he lived in and he would participate in the yearly school book fairs. I loved his books as a child - but as a child would. As an adult introducing my children to them, I find them even more refreshing and meaningful.
Call me jaded, but whenever I hear a book from a famous and long-deceased author has "been discovered", I assume that it has been known for decades but the publisher only now thought it would be economically propitious to make it available. That is, after all, what we have seen innumerable times in the case of Tolkien and many classic science-fiction writers.
Maybe. The story in the article is a lot more plausible than, say, Harper Lee's agent saying "Harper Lee has just decided to release this book that she never wanted to release, immediately after her last living relative died, and also she doesn't want to talk to anyone but me about it."
Not so. The material in "Unfinished Tales" was known since at least immediately after Tolkien's death, but publication was delayed for years until "The Silmarillion" had been published and allowed to soak up bestseller attention for a while first. The same is true of "The Tale of Beren and Lúthien", which Christopher Tolkien was aware of all those years since his father's death, but it was decided to save them for a rainy day.
Publishers do this every time a famous author dies or becomes incompetent (in the legal sense of the word). Go Set a Watchman was a very early draft of To Kill a Mockingbird but sold to the public as an uncovered sequel novel a short while after Harper Lee's sister Alice died.
http://www.cc.com/video-clips/gzi3ec/the-colbert-report-grim...
No interview discussion complete without mention of the true master Terry Gross:
http://www.npr.org/2011/12/29/144077273/maurice-sendak-on-li...