The most unusual of all uncompleted literary masterpieces—in terms of both subject matter and textual history—is certainly the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. De Sade was one of seven prisoners incarcerated in the Bastille at the beginning of the French Revolution, and although ten days before what became known as “Bastille Day” (July 14, 1789) he was moved elsewhere, his manuscripts and belongings lay behind in the tower-prison and vanished when the Bastille was stormed, looted, and eventually destroyed.

Many valuable manuscripts were lost, seemingly forever, but the one that de Sade considered to be his masterpiece—120 Days of Sodom—was the one that caused him to shed “tears of blood.” The manuscript describes the first thirty days of a ruthless and endlessly blasphemous libertine orgy of sex and violence, with notes outlining the following extremely well-organized ninety days. The thirty fully composed days make up a meticulously and gorgeously cruel progression through “the 150 simple passions,” while the notes sketch out “the 150 complex passions,” “the 150 criminal passions,” and “the 150 murderous passions” that were to complete the book. The extant “simple” passions alone are beyond shocking and force the reader to imagine the unimaginable and challenge the reader to consider that these words are simply words on a page and to suspend morality or judgment and simply read this work of literary terrorism.

The manuscript was never publicly recovered during de Sade’s lifetime, and he spent the rest of his life and career lamenting his lost work while expanding his style and themes but never again recovering the sheer fury of his nearly inconceivable lost masterpiece. Luckily for us (or unluckily, depending on your point of view), the microscopically composed scroll was seized and saved during the storming of the Bastille, was passed to a family that saved it for three generations, and was then sold to a German collector named Dr. Iwan Bloch, who in 1904 published an altered and pseudonymous version of the text because of its “scientific importance.”

After Dr. Bloch died, Maurice Heine acquired the manuscript in 1929 and subsequently published it in an authoritative edition under de Sade’s name, thus returning the unfinished masterpiece to its rightful author after nearly one hundred and fifty years. What’s nearly as amazing as the contents of the manuscript and notes for the unfinished book, however, is the author’s extremely astute list of “Mistakes I Have Made,” proving that de Sade had full mastery of his uncompleted work and that he knew how to make its horrifying contents even more effectively horrifying. Anyone who’s read this astonishing work can only marvel (and shudder) to imagine what it could have been.

In the twentieth century, two of the most exemplary (but very different) writers of the age—Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust—also both have famously unfinished masterpieces. Kafka’s completed short stories are perhaps the most perfect and resonant of our time, and even his fragmentary tales and parables and sketches offer endless riches, but he was never able to complete any of his three novels. Of the three, his second, The Trial, is clearly the standout masterpiece, but his first, Amerika, is hilariously strange, and his third, The Castle, takes the author’s labyrinthine method to its farthest extreme. The incomplete quests dramatized in these fragmentary works are often taken as reflections of our fragmentary times, and many critics read these novels’ unfinished stories as parables of the impossibility of attaining truth or personal autonomy in a world of bureaucracies and tyrannies.

These readings often more reflect the critics’ circumscribed minds, however, because even though Kafka was frequently quite frustrated as an artist, it’s important for readers to remember that his final plan for The Castle included having his protagonist, K, attain his goal of finding access, meaning, and resolution within the seemingly impenetrable castle. Many critics ignore this fact, choosing to focus on the futility illustrated in these novels, and there is much to be learned in these kinds of readings, but as Hamlet says, “there are more things in heaven and earth . . . than are dreamt of in [this kind of] philosophy.”