BURIED IN THE LIBRARY
The Find: The Inheritance, Louisa May Alcott's first novel
Where It Was Found: On a shelf in a Harvard University library.
The Story: The manuscript, hand-written by Alcott, represents one of the grossest oversights in Western literature: it was listed in the Harvard card catalog under "The Inheritance, a manuscript; Boston, 1849; 166 pages, unpublished, her first novel."
Even so, probably fewer than a dozen people even knew it existed, and it didn't occur to any of them to publish it. At least five people had checked it out since the library acquired it, and a microfilm copy was made for a scholar. But that was it -- the manuscript sat virtually ignored for nearly 150 years, until Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy, two professors researching a book on Alcott, came across it in the late 1980s. They made a Xerox copy of it, took it home, and transcribed it. In 1996, they submitted it to an agent... who began shopping it to publishers and movie studios. Estimated worth: $1 million. |
