It is a cherished fictional device to build a story around the discovery of a previously unpublished text. The stratagem is used by Henry James in "The Aspern Papers." A.S. Byatt's Booker-Prize winning novel, "Possession: A Romance," is also built this way. "The Lee Shore" is not an invention, but an actual flesh-and-blood manuscript. I only know about the book, because its author, Loyd "Pete" Collins, was a colleague and a close friend of my father, John Cheever.

In 1935 Collins published a well-thought-of novel titled "Call Me Ishmael." He then stopped publishing books, but he didn't...