Just before his death Eiseley asked his wife to destroy the personal notebooks which he had kept since 1953. However, she compromised by disassembling them so they couldn't be used. Later, after great effort, his good friend Kenneth Heuer managed to reassemble most of his notebooks into readable form. "The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eiseley" includes a variety of Eiseley's writings including childhood stories, sketches while he was a vagabond, old family pictures, unpublished poems, portions of unfinished novels, and letters to and from literary admirers like W.H. Auden, Howard Nemerov, Lewis Mumford and Ray Bradbury.