If you're going to lose anything, it might as well be a big one. That appears to be the reasoning that our species has used to the Margites, an ancient comedy epic authored by the Greek poet Homer, The First Work Of Western Literature.

Homer penned the Margites before the more renowned (and surviving) Iliad and Odyssey, according to various ancient sources. It was also reportedly quite good, with Aristotle asserting in On the Art of Poetry that it "essentially founded Greek comedy." And, given that the Iliad is now commonly referred to be the "first great book" and the "first work of Western literature," the glory should have gone to the lost Margites.

In other words, discovering this missing comedy would provide us with more than simply a new book by one of history's greatest authors. It would entail starting again with the whole Western canon. The Smithsonian named it the best work "you'll never get an opportunity to read" on their list of missing books, a fitting epitaph for Western Literature's very first item.

Franz Kafka was maybe the most influential writer of the twentieth century. Kafka was a lonely Czech Jew who wrote on human alienation in the face of large, sophisticated bureaucracies. His work is maybe the most studied in the world. Modern researchers value every word he wrote so much that compilations of his work memos have been released. However, some of Kafka's most essential communication is still missing: 35 love letters he wrote with Dora Diamant soon before his death. Kafka's last love letters are the cultural artifacts lost to humanity forever.

Diamant was residing in Berlin in 1933, nine years after Kafka died, and still kept the communication. Unfortunately, being Jewish in Berlin in 1933 was not a pleasant experience. The newly emboldened Nazi party stormed her house one evening, taking or destroying everything inside. Diamant was compelled to quit the city, leaving behind the letters. It is currently believed that they were almost definitely destroyed by the Nazis, however, others believe they were kept in a Soviet archive following World War II until the late 1980s. In any case, they're no longer there.

In 1888, Jack the Ripper sent the London police a letter titled "from Hell." The ‘From Hell’ Letter contains half of a human kidney. Many serial murderers saw it as the most reliable and authentic means of contact. This kidney came from his victim, who had written the letter. The letter, which was on the paper, was then misplaced. It is stated that it was either taken or thrown away, leaving no proof for this story.

The ramifications of this tragedy are enormous. For one thing, we could have used current tools to determine if the kidney originated from one of Jack's victims. If it did, we'd be able to verify the letter itself. Second, it's always conceivable that some trace was left on the paper, allowing us to ultimately solve the Whitechapel murders. Instead, this crucial evidence was most likely taken or discarded, leaving us as perplexed as the Victorians.

Dead Souls should have been the great Russian novel, just as Ambersons should have been the great American film. It was written by Nikolai Gogol and followed a con artist who bought the souls of deceased peasants in order to become wealthy. The intended trilogy, according to Gogol, would be a masterwork in which "all Russia will emerge." Unfortunately, only the first portion was ever released. Part three - the second half of Dead Souls was never written, while part two was written but immediately burned in a religious rage.

Gogol encountered a spiritual counsellor named Father Matthew at the end of his life. Father Matthew persuaded him to burn Dead Souls for the sake of his own soul after being shocked by the immorality in Gogol's works. Gogol supposedly recognized what he'd done immediately after ruining his life's work, went into a profound melancholy, refused to eat, and died quickly. Only early versions of several chapters have survived, leaving little of Gogol's great, unifying vision for his masterwork.

In 1942, filmmaker Orson Welles was fresh off the success of his film Citizen Kane. In search of a fresh project, he turned to The Magnificent Ambersons, a prize-winning but practically forgotten novel. He quickly created a masterwork that modern reviewers have compared to Kane's. And they say this without even having seen the entire film—the studio deleted roughly a third of it.

Because Kane was a box office flop, RKO executives felt Welles didn't know how to direct a film. So when he showed them his heartfelt, 132-minute elegy to his childhood America, they pulled out the knives and chopped them to bits. Over 40 minutes of material were taken from Ambersons and secretly thrown at sea while Welles was filming another film in South America.

The damaged material comprised the majority of the second half as well as the original finale. Although the complete first half and a new finale remain, the film that may have been the finest ever created is no longer available. And the ending of Orson Welles’s second film is one of the cultural artifacts lost to humanity forever.

Abraham Lincoln entered the platform on May 29, 1856, in a modest building in Bloomington, Illinois, and made a 90-minute firebrand address. The Illinois Republican Party was founded as a result of this speech. It catapulted Lincoln into the spotlight. It paved the way for the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the birth of modern America. There is no known duplicate of it.

We have a general idea of what the speech was about. We also have the occasional chunk that someone scribbled down at the meeting. But a complete, precise copy of what was spoken that night? Nonexistent. Lincoln, like an early radio broadcaster, just delivered a series of impassioned words that faded into the ether.

Lincoln may have purposefully altered the speech, which featured some rather hardline views on slavery, to avoid accusations of radicalism. Whatever the reason, Lincoln's lost speech is still considered his best speech and the only one you will never have to study.

The creator of Alice in Wonderland was fascinated with maintaining a journal. The Lewis Carroll Society claims that he kept a continuous journal of his life from the age of ten until a month before his death. Each item is extensive and insightful, and the entries as a whole are essential for comprehending parts of his work. The only problem is that one-third of them are missing.

Some of the missing sections describe pivotal events in Carroll's life. Among these is his friendship with Alice Liddell, the 8-year-old muse for Alice in Wonderland. It's long been speculated that the adult Carroll had romantic feelings for Alice, and a dramatic falling out with her parents in June 1863 lends credence to this theory. Unfortunately, Lewis Carroll’s diaries from this time period have vanished, the pages burned by a Carroll descendant. If discovered, they might either preserve or destroy his reputation, as well as provide insight into the unusual psyche of one of the Victorian era's best writers.