Literary discovery in…Conway, NH?
You won’t believe this.
A friend of mine from Harvard, Bob Glandon, who teaches English at a small college in New Hampshire, happens to live in Conway, NH, near the home of Dan Brown’s parents. He just wrote to tell me some remarkable news.
Yesterday, he was taking his garbage to the town dump and, as he was throwing his trashbag into the container for recyclable paper, a sheet of paper in the container caught his eye – in particular, two words that stood out clearly: “Langdon” and “Louvre”. He looked closer. The sentence read: “Langdon’s manuscript, while discussing the Louvre’s extensive collection of goddess art, had made a passing note of this modest pyramid.”
Having, like the rest of the planet, recently finished reading The Da Vinci Code, Glandon realized immediately that he was looking at a page of the novel, but the piece of paper was not from a book. It was ordinary typing paper; in the margins, there were marks and notes in red ink. As he read on, it became apparent that he was looking at the last page of the novel. He literally couldn’t believe his eyes: he was staring at an early draft of the the most popular novel of all time.
Was it possible that Dan Brown had disposed of this draft at his parents house? It seemed unlikely, but…
More from our man in Rome….