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One summer evening in 1889, Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde dined at the Langham Hotel in London with American businessman and editor of the monthly magazine Lippincott, J. M. Stoddart.

By the time they left, Wilde had committed to writing The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Conan Doyle had agreed to write The Sign of Four, one of his most famous Sherlock Holmes stories.

Now Doyle's letters recounting that fateful dinner and his only manuscript, The Sign of Four, are being auctioned at Sotheby's in New York, along with other literary treasures.

The manuscript alone is expected to sell for $1.2 million given its unique significance and status as the most valuable Conan Doyle item ever offered at auction, Sotheby's said in a statement.

"It's hard to think of two modern authors who could be less similar than Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde," Selby Kieffer, the auction house's international senior specialist for books and manuscripts, told CNN. “And yet, they sit together at the dinner table and talk about what they are working on. So, you're thrown into the environment of that time, and it really helps (us) understand the origins and creation of the manuscript, which is very rare.”

The manuscript itself is exceptionally clean, containing only Stoddart's corrections to Americanize the spelling, and a few crossed out words as Conan Doyle himself made changes to his work. All of Doyle's other surviving manuscripts, most of which are in museums, also show no signs of editing, Kieffer added. 

The Sign of Four is Conan Doyle's second Sherlock Holmes novel, commissioned by Stoddart to capitalize on the popularity of this detective's first adventure in A Study in Scarlet. The manuscript represents only part of the collection amassed by Dr. Rodney P. Swantko, a Chicago collector who died two years ago.

Other lots include four novels written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of which is a copy of The Great Gatsby, estimated at $250,000. 

Copies of the first edition of Lolita, which Vladimir Nabokov sent to fellow writer Graham Greene and his wife Vera, will also go under the hammer. 

The auction will take place live in New York on June 26.

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