storage and retrieval

From: Who Is Your Lawyer?

“On this day in 1956 [November 19], while visiting the Ritz Hotel in Paris, Ernest Hemingway was alerted by the staff that he’d had two trunks stored there since the 1920s, and if he didn’t claim them, they’d be tossed in the trash. Hemingway was surprised when he claimed the luggage and found lost manuscripts and notes, some of which would eventually make up A Moveable Feast, one of the most famous literary memoirs ever.

     Remembering the unlikely rescue of Hemingway’s work gives us a moment to pause and think about all the work by all the greats that didn’t actually make it. Whether tossed into the fire, stolen, or just plain lost in a box somewhere, here are a few storied pieces of writing that we’ll probably never get to read.”
— Jason Diamond, Flavorwire
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“As the literary-minded will no doubt recall, on the cusp of Hemingway’s early fame virtually all of his finished but as yet unpublished work was lost in a bizarre twist of fate. The incident, which occurred in late December, 1922, is noted by Hemingway in A Moveable Feast and receives half a paragraph in Carlos Baker’s biography of Hemingway.
     As Baker reports, Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, before catching a train from Paris to Switzerland to meet her husband, had packed all his manuscripts (except for Up in Michigan and My Old Man) 'in a separate small valise so that he (Hemingway) could get on with his writing during the Christmas season.' However, at the Gare de Lyon someone purloined the bag holding Hemingway’s pages — which contained poems and short stories and the beginning of a novel never again seen.”
— Robert Scott Lawrence, Who Is Your Lawyer?
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