Editing Lost literary work (section)

===20th century===
* [[James Joyce]]'s play ''A Brilliant Career'' (which he burned) and the first half of his novel ''[[Stephen Hero]]''. His grandson Stephen later burned Nora Joyce's letters to James as well.
* [[J. Meade Falkner]] left an almost complete fourth and last novel on a train and felt he was too old to start again.
* A number of [[Scott Joplin]]'s compositions have been lost, including his first opera, ''[[A Guest of Honor (opera)|A Guest of Honor]]''.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://operawire.com/opera-wiki-scott-joplins-a-guest-of-honor/|title=A Guest of Honor|website=operawire.com|date=25 January 2023 |access-date=August 22, 2023}}</ref>
* [[John P. Marquand]] wrote an early novel called ''Yellow Ivory'' in collaboration with his friend W. A. Macdonald.<ref>{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=0Q4eAAAAMAAJ&q=%22yellow+ivory%22 |title=Writers and writing – Robert Van Gelder – Google Boeken |access-date=2012-12-01|last1=Gelder |first1=Robert Van |year=1946 }}</ref>
* Various parts of [[Daniel Paul Schreber]]'s ''"Memoirs of My Nervous Illness"'' (original German title ''"Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken"'') (1903) were destroyed by his wife and doctor Flesching for protecting his reputation, which was mentioned by [[Sigmund Freud]] as highly important in his essay ''"The Schreber Case"'' (1911).
* [[L. Frank Baum]] wrote four novels for adults that were never published and disappeared: ''Our Married Life'' and ''Johnson'' (1912), ''The Mystery of Bonita'' (1914), and ''Molly Oodle'' (1915). Baum's son claimed that Baum's wife burned these, but this was after being cut out of her will. Evidence that Baum's publisher received these manuscripts survives. Also lost are Baum's 1904 short stories "Mr. Rumple's Chill" and "Bess of the Movies", as well as his early plays ''Kilmourne, or O'Connor's Dream'' (opened April 4, 1883) and ''The Queen of [[Killarney]]'' (1883).
* In 1907, [[August Strindberg]] destroyed a play, ''The Bleeding Hand'', immediately after writing it. He was in a bad mood at the time and commented in a letter that the piece was unusually harsh, even for him.
* "Text I" of ''[[Seven Pillars of Wisdom]]'', a 250,000-word manuscript by [[T. E. Lawrence]] lost at [[Reading railway station]] in December 1919.
* In 1922, a suitcase with almost all of [[Ernest Hemingway]]'s work to date was stolen from a train compartment at the [[Paris-Gare de Lyon|Gare de Lyon]] in Paris, from his wife. It included a partial [[World War I]] novel.<ref name="auto1"/>
* The novels ''Tobold'' and ''Theodor'' by [[Robert Walser (writer)|Robert Walser]] are lost, possibly destroyed by the author, as is a third, unnamed novel. (1910–1921)
* [[Jean Sibelius]] burned his unfinished 8th Symphony and several of his unfinished works in the 1920s.
* The original version of ''Ultramarine'' by [[Malcolm Lowry]] was stolen from his publisher's car in 1932, and the author had to reconstruct it.
* [[Franz Kafka]]'s last lover, [[Dora Diamant]], ignored his wishes to have his works destroyed posthumously. Instead she kept some 20 notebooks and 35–36 letters. The Gestapo in 1933 seized all papers in her home, including these notebooks and letters, in their search to find communist propaganda. Only three of these letters have been discovered since. Furthermore, when [[Max Brod]], Kafka's literary executor who similarly ignored his wishes, died in 1968, he left Kafka's papers to his secretary, who left them to her daughters. The papers then passed into the ownership of the [[National Library of Israel]] in 2016. After a lengthy legal dispute between the library and the daughters, many of these papers have yet to be published. 
* Yogananda's ''Autobiography of a Yogi'' quotes extensively from Richard Wright's travel diaries in 1935/6.  Following Wright's death they have become 'lost'.
* In 1938 [[George Orwell]] wrote ''Socialism and War'', an "anti-war pamphlet" for which he could not find a publisher. Although many previously unknown letters and other documents relating to Orwell have been discovered in recent years, no trace of this pamphlet has yet come to light. With the beginning of [[World War II]] Orwell's views on [[pacifism]] were to change radically, so he may well have destroyed the manuscript.
* Lost papers and a possible unfinished novel by [[Isaac Babel]], confiscated by the NKVD, May 1939.<ref>{{cite web | title=Critic's Notebook; Isaac Babel May Yet Have The Last Word | website=The New York Times | date=July 11, 2001 | url=https://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/11/books/critic-s-notebook-isaac-babel-may-yet-have-the-last-word.html | access-date=August 14, 2022}}</ref>
* Manuscript of ''[[Efebos]]'', a novel by [[Karol Szymanowski]], destroyed in bombing of Warsaw, 1939.<!-- ?date -->
* Five volumes of poetry and a drama, all in manuscript, by [[Saint-John Perse]] were destroyed at his house outside Paris soon after he had gone into exile in the summer of 1940. The diplomat Alexis Léger (Perse's real name) was a well-known and uncompromising anti-Nazi and his house was raided by German troops. The works had been written during his diplomat years, but Perse had decided not to publish any new writing until he had retired from diplomacy.
* [[Walter Benjamin]] had a completed manuscript in his suitcase when he fled France and arrest by the Nazis in the summer of 1940. He committed suicide in [[Portbou]], Spain on September 26, 1940, and the suitcase and its contents disappeared.
* There are reports that [[Bruno Schulz]] worked on a novel called ''The Messiah'', but no trace of this manuscript survived his death (1942).
* [[Margot Frank]]'s diary was never found (1944). Of [[The Diary of Anne Frank]], the original volume or volumes covering the period between December 1942 and December 1943 was never found, and assumed to have been taken by the Nazis who raided the hiding place. This period is only known from the version Anne rewrote for preservation, which is known to have been in many ways different from her original.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/main-characters/margot-frank/|title=Margot Frank's Diary|website=www.annefrank.org|access-date=August 22, 2023}}</ref>
* The novel ''[[In Ballast to the White Sea]]'' by [[Malcolm Lowry]], lost in a fire in 1945.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://lostmanuscripts.com/2012/02/29/the-real-lowry-lost-manuscript/|title=The real Lowry lost manuscript|date=29 February 2012}}</ref>
* The novel ''Wanderers of Night'' and poems of [[Daniil Andreev]] were destroyed in 1947 as "anti-Soviet literature" by the [[Ministry for State Security (USSR)|MGB]].
* Some pages of [[William Burroughs]]'s original version of ''[[Naked Lunch]]'' were stolen.
* Three early, unpublished novels by [[Philip K. Dick]] written in the 1950s are no longer extant: ''[[A Time for George Stavros]]'', ''[[Pilgrim on the Hill]]'', and ''[[Nicholas and the Higs]]''.
* In 1958, while working on the last chapter, [[William H. Gass]]'s novel ''[[Omensetter's Luck]]'' was stolen off of his desk, forcing him to begin from scratch.
* The manuscript for [[Sylvia Plath]]'s unfinished second novel, provisionally titled ''Double Exposure'', or ''Double Take'', written 1962–63, disappeared some time before 1970.<ref name="auto1"/>
* [[Venedikt Yerofeyev]]'s novel ''[[Dmitry Shostakovich]]'' was in a bag with two bottles of fortified wine that was stolen from him in a [[commuter train]] in 1972.
* Several pages of the original screenplay for [[Werner Herzog]]'s ''[[Aguirre, the Wrath of God|Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes]]'' were reportedly thrown out of the window of a bus after one of his football teammates threw up on them.
* The screenplay for the proposed [[Dean Stockwell]]–Herb Berman film ''After the Gold Rush'' is reportedly lost.
* ''Diaries'' of [[Philip Larkin]] – burned at his request after his death on 2 December 1985. Other private papers were kept, contrary to his instructions.
* The fourth novel of [[Sasha Sokolov]] have been lost when the Greek house where it was written burned down in the second half the 1980s.
* [[Jacob M. Appel]]'s first novel manuscript, ''Paste and Cover'', was in the trunk of an automobile that was stolen in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1998. The vehicle was recovered, but the manuscript was not.<ref>Appel, JM. ''Phoning Home'', University of South Carolina Press, 2014{{Page needed|date=September 2024}}</ref>