10 Tales of Manuscript Burning (And Some That Survived)

“Manuscripts don’t burn,” says the devil in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, pulling one that everyone thought had out from under his enormous talking cat. Of course they don’t, one might think. Well, not anymore, anyway. After all, these days so many books are written directly into the cloud that burning would seem nearly impossible—barring the global crash that is almost definitely coming if we stay on our current path. Perhaps that’s why legends of destroyed manuscripts linger so long in the literary imagination—we’re beginning to forget the truth that anything might be lost forever.