5 Long-Lost Novels We Hope are Rediscovered

2015 is shaping up to be the Year of the Lost Work: several high-profile books thought lost forever have recently been unearthed and published. Most famous, of course, is Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, which dropped this summer, but we’ve also seen a heretofore unknown book by Dr. Seuss (Which Pet Should I Get?), rumbles of a third Lee novel, and the revelation that a long-lost short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Temperature,” was discovered by Andrew Gulli (of The Strand Magazine). In recent years, short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle and John Steinbeck have also been found and published.
Lives are messy, and in the pre-digital age, who knows how writers filed and organized their unfinished work. It’s possible there’s a lot more to come. We started thinking about other lost manuscripts that might see the light of day in a decade or two, and a few we’d particularly love to see unearthed.

Hemingway’s suitcase stories
In 1922, Hemingway had yet to publish any fiction. When an editor expressed interest in his work, he asked his wife to pack up his manuscripts and bring them to Switzerland. She did so, packing every original and carbon copy into a suitcase—which was lost en route, and never found. Hemingway later came to view the lost works as “juvenilia” and never seemed all that broken up over their loss, but it would be absolutely fascinating to discover that suitcase somewhere and see what a 23-year-old Hemingway created by that stage of his life. He went on to become a master of the form, with a unique style still being aped today—that suitcase would be a priceless find.

Philip K. Dick’s lost novels
Today, Philip K. Dick is known as a trippy sci-fi writer whose works accounts for 33 percent of all movies made each year, but early in his career, Dick saw his speculative fiction as a way of paying the bills until his “straight” fiction took hold. In the late 1940s and early ’50s, he wrote at least three complete novels that were never published and no longer exist (although some notes and index card synopses survive). Dick didn’t hold these early works (A Time for George Stavros, Pilgrim on the Hill, and Nicholas and the Higs) in high regard, but we’d love the chance to decide for ourselves.

Sylvia Plath’s second novel
Plath took her own life before completing her second novel, Double Exposure, and the manuscript reportedly mysteriously disappeared in 1970. Her husband, Ted Hughes—who inherited her archives—was pretty sketchy about much of her writing, burning at least one journal, keeping others from the public, and generally supporting everyone’s opinion that Plath had many not-so-nice things to say about him. Whether Hughes burned the manuscript of Double Exposure or locked it away somewhere is a mystery—and one we’d love to see solved, as Plath’s tragic life produced some incredible writing, and more of it would be a welcome addition to her legacy.

L. Frank Baum’s lost adult novels
Considering how well-known and widely published Baum is, it’s amazing to learn that four entire novels and several short stories he penned are considered completely lost, with no clues as to what might have happened to them. What makes it even more tragic is that the novels—Our Marred Life, Johnson, The Mystery of Bonita, and Molly Oodle—were intended for an adult audience, unlike his most famous works, the Oz books.

Thomas Hardy’s lost novel
This one won’t be found, because Hardy burned it after finding it impossible to sell to a publisher. It was his first book, written in 1867, and it would be invaluable from both an academic and an artistic point of view, considering it was written seven years before Far from the Madding Crowd, and would offer essential insight into his development as a writer. It’s always possible that “reportedly burned” could turn out to be an exaggeration, and the manuscript will turn up somewhere someday. Fingers crossed.