Lost Works - Notable Lost Works - 20th Century

20th Century

The only known copies of the score of the 1903 Scott Joplin opera A Guest of Honor were believed to be confiscated during a dispute between Joplin and the owner of a theatrical boarding house. The score was never recovered by Joplin and it is believed to be lost.
James Joyce's play "A Brilliant Career" (which he burned) and the first half of his novel Stephen Hero (which may yet turn up)
Various parts of Daniel Paul Schreber's "Memoirs of My Nervous Illness" (original German title "Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken") (1903) was 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 Marred 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.
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.
The French composer Albéric Magnard's house was set on fire by German soldiers in 1914. The fire destroyed Magnard's unpublished scores, such as the orchestral score of his early opera Yolande, the orchestral score of Guercoeur (the piano reduction had been published, and the orchestral score of the second act was extant) and a more recent song cycle.
"Text I" of Seven Pillars of Wisdom - a 250,000 word manuscript by T. E. Lawrence lost at Reading railway station in December 1919.
The Irish Public Records Office in Dublin was burnt by the IRA in 1922, destroying 1,000 years of state and religious archives.
In 1922, a suitcase with almost all of Ernest Hemingway's work to date was stolen from a train compartment at the Gare de Lyon in Paris, from his wife. It included a partial WWI novel.
The novels Tobold and Theodor by Robert Walser are lost, possibly destroyed by the author, as is a third, unnamed novel. (1910–1921)
Symphony No. 8 (Sibelius). Composer Jean Sibelius mysteriously destroyed his last symphony.
The original version of Ultramarine by Malcolm Lowry was stolen from his publisher's car in 1932, and the author had to reconstruct it.
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 a letter of 1938, George Orwell mentions an "anti-war pamphlet" that he had written earlier that year but could not get published. Not even the title of this pamphlet is known today. With the beginning of World War Two 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.
Manuscript of Efebos, a novel by Karol Szymanowski, destroyed in bombing of Warsaw, 1939.
Constant Lambert's ballet Horoscope was being performed in the Netherlands in 1940, and the unpublished full score had to be left behind when German forces invaded that country. It was never recovered, and only nine individual numbers remain.
The German-language original of Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon was lost. Only the English translation by Daphne Hardy survived to be published.
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 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).
In 1944, just before the Warsaw Uprising, the Polish composer Andrzej Panufnik fled Warsaw leaving all his manuscripts behind. When he returned to his apartment in 1945, he discovered that his entire oeuvre had survived the widespread destruction, but had then been burnt on a bonfire by his landlady. The lost works included two symphonies and other orchestral works, as well as vocal and chamber compositions; Panufnik subsequently reconstructed some of them.
The novel In Ballast to the White Sea by Malcolm Lowry, lost in a fire in 1945.
The novel Wanderers of Night and poems of Daniil Andreev were destroyed in 1947 as "anti-Soviet literature" by the MGB.
Some pages of William Burroughs's original 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.
The manuscript for Sylvia Plath's unfinished second novel, provisionally titled Double Exposure, or Double Take, written 1962-63, disappeared some time before 1970.
There were known audio recordings of early performances by The Beatles, such as a song which featured Ringo Starr on drums before he was an "official" member. These tapes have thought to been taped over or destroyed.
Several pages of the original screenplay for Werner Herzog's Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes were reportedly thrown out of the window of a bus after one of his football team-mates 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 - burnt at his request after his death on 2 December 1985. Other private papers were kept, contrary to his instructions.
Stephen King wrote both a prologue and epilogue to The Shining titled Before The Play and After The Play, respectively. The epilogue is reportedly lost.
Hundreds of works by the Norwegian composer and pianist Geirr Tveitt were lost due to a house fire in 1970, when his house burned to the ground. Overall, about 4/5 of Tveitt's production are now gone from that fire, which included symphonies, concertos, choral works, operas, and many piano works. Fortunately some copies, parts, and recordings of some of the works existed elsewhere.