We are digging up the dead: systems, documents, and other intellectual contri-butions from the early period of story generation that our community has, in theintervening decades, forgotten. Our project is to dismantle the prevailing historyof this area, which we now know is inaccurate in several ways, to furnish a newaccount that tells us more about where we came from and where we should gonext.1To carry out this project, we are scouring archives, translating documents,and engaging in personal correspondences with the scholars and system builderswho were active in this period. Our discoveries include three systems that pre-cede what is widely believed to be the earliest story generator; we are poised in afollow-up paper to nearly triple the number of known systems from before 1990.In many cases, these exhumed systems anticipate approaches that, decades later