Toward the end of E.L. Doctorow's novel "Homer & Langley," narrator Homer Collyer, the real-life Manhattanite notorious for his and his brother Langley's reclusive lifestyle and hoarding of sundry objects, frets about their legacy: "For what could be more terrible than being turned into a mythic joke? How could we cope, once dead and gone, with no one available to reclaim our history?"