Biggest literary setbacks in history?

>>8499712

T. E. Lawrence lost the original manuscript for The Seven Pillars of Wisdom on a train near Reading, if I remember rightly. He had to write a second version from memory.

>>8499712
Stevenson's wife burned the manuscript of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde because she read and hated it. He had to rewrite the entire thing from memory.


One of Hemingway's manuscripts was lost when his luggage went missing on a train. It wasn't until years later that it was found. I can't remember which one it was though, I want to say For Whom the Bell Tolls but I'm not sure.

>>8499712
Didn't Joyce lose the original Ulysses manuscript on a bus?

Nazis burned some manuscripts of Saint John Perse and Bruno Schulz

and they shot Schulz for

>>8499712
The Library of Alexandria

>>8500001
This

>>8499712

Of the hundreds of greek playwrights, and around 100 plays from each of the good ones, we have something like 30 surviving greek plays. We assume they're among the best written, but we have no way of knowing.

Also, there were some apparently really amazing roman Latin epics written in a more native meter than, say, Virgil's, but they don't survive at all.

>>8500001
>>8500005
Meme answer

>>8499712
>John Michael Green (born August 24, 1977)

>>8499712
Same son of a bitch that stole his work also attempted to poison him and set the original manuscript to stage to no success if I remember.

>>8500001
there's a funny pasta about a guy time traveling to browse the library of alexandria and he just finds shitty drawings and records of who owns what
wish i had that now

>>8499712
The loss of Emperor Claudius' histories and dictionaries of the Carthaginians and Etruscans.

>>8499712

Gogol tossed his ms of Dead Souls in the fireplace
The big one of course is >>8500001
>tfw he'd've gotten quints if he'd just typed 'Alexandria' but instead they went to something probably really terrible which let's just find out: >>8500000

>>8500134
On a related note, Gibbon said the loss of the official Roman financial register was the greatest historical loss ever

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Jean Genet wrote Our Lady of the Flowers on brown paper bag material while in prison. One of the guards discovered the manuscript and destroyed it, so Genet just wrote the whole thing over again.

>>8499712
On the plus side having the manuscript stolen gave birth to the character of Furber and his whole portion of the novel which is brilliant.

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>John Stuart Mill, a friend of Carlyle's, found himself caught up in other projects and unable to meet the terms of a contract he had signed with his publisher for a history of the French Revolution. Mill proposed that Carlyle produce the work instead; Mill even sent his friend a library of books and other materials concerning the Revolution, and by 1834 Carlyle was working furiously on the project. When he had completed the first volume, Carlyle sent his only complete manuscript to Mill. While in Mill's care the manuscript was destroyed, according to Mill by a careless household maid who mistook it for trash and used it as a firelighter. Carlyle then rewrote the entire manuscript, achieving what he described as a book that came "direct and flamingly from the heart."

Fucking liberals man, they always fuck up.

I wonder if one day people will find all those Kafka notebooks the Gestapo confiscated from Dora Diamant

Diogenes's writings weren't found.
A setback for us.