I remember monopolizing the office hours of one of my professors in graduate school, a well known British author, by filling the time with pretentious talk of the literary life — as if we were somehow peers.

Perhaps “monopolizing” isn’t the right word. There was never a line outside the door. The other graduate students avoided his office hours, probably out of a generous impulse not to hound the poor guy. But I had no such scruples. Here was a bonafide best-selling literary novelist. I was a writer, too! We had this important thing in common. Besides, he was a guest in our country. In my mind, I was a one-man welcoming committee.

In those days, I took myself very seriously, an all-too-common pitfall for graduate students. But I took my writing seriously, too, which was a mitigating factor. My professor listened thoughtfully to my absurd questions about the business of writing, long before I was ready to publish, and always made an effort to hide the ironic smile that played at the corners of his pallid English lips.

One afternoon, I tested the limits of his patience with a long-winded diatribe, the gist of which was, “I’m terribly sensitive and creative; people just don’t get me; so I’m prepared to be appreciated posthumously.”

I think I actually used the phrase “appreciated posthumously.” The other sentiments were more or less implied.

The look on his face was priceless. My whining had finally overwhelmed his legendary reserve.

“I hope you’re joking,” he said.

When it became clear I wasn’t, he simply added, “What’s the point in doing it, then?”

That certainly shut me up, but as I nursed my wounds over a beer at the Charles Village Pub that evening, I made my case to my writing buddies. Laboring in obscurity was often the tragic price of genius. “Some of my favorite writers weren’t appreciated in their lifetimes. Take my man Kafka–”

My friends groaned. I could drive a person senseless with boredom by talking about Kafka. I’d done it before.

“No, really,” I said. “He published one slim volume of stories while he was alive. The fame came later. Or James Joyce. That guy died decades before the world caught up to him.”

[A quick sidebar: the fact that we — meaning, mainly me — habitually measured our lives against these literary giants, to the point of referring to them in familiar terms like “my man” or “that guy”, was merely a kind of defense against the yawning indifference of the world. Writing is a brutal, ego-annihilating business. As my nephew likes to say, “Don’t judge me!”]

A few more beers led to a consensus: our professor had been right to bust me for blathering under the influence of narcissism — but I did have a point. If fame and recognition in one’s own time were the benchmarks of success, then literary history was badly out of whack. A writer who managed to survive both the judgement of his peers and the judgment of history was exceeding rare. Mark Twain came to mind, and Leo Tolstoy, and Shakespeare, and a handful of others. But it seemed to me that the bulk of achievement in the arts and sciences fell into another category, that of the unsung hero.

The plight of the unsung hero came to mind this week when I read an appreciation in the New York Times — a revised obituary, really — of Alice Kober, a classics professor at Brooklyn College who died in 1949.

Professor Kober was a secret scribbler very much in the mode of my man Kafka or that guy James Joyce, only instead of devoting her life to the pursuit of literature, she spent her years trying to decipher an ancient script known as Linear B.

Archaeologists had been trying to crack Linear B ever since a payload of tablets and shards with mysterious markings was discovered in 1900 on the island of Crete. But their work was hampered by the bewildering number of symbols incised in the clay — about 200 distinct syllabic signs and ideograms — and the lack of a multilingual key, an artifact with identical passages in more than one language, like the Rosetta Stone.

So Alice Kober set about analyzing the tablets like a code breaker, systematizing the symbols, making endless notes about their placement and frequency, creating an improvised card catalogue in the empty cartons of the cigarettes she chain-smoked as she worked.

This was the labor of ten years, her days as a professor spilling over into nights and weekends.

In one of history’s cruel ironies, she died before cracking the code, or at least before publishing a solution. That glory went to a young Englishman named Michael Ventris a few years later, who used the fruits of her method to help decipher Linear B and reveal its ancient Minoan secrets to the world.

But now, thanks to Margalit Fox, a senior obituary writer for the New York Times and the author of The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code, Alice Kober is finally receiving a reappraisal of her life’s work.

Which is as it should be.

But the appreciation is, alas, posthumous. How would Alice Kober have answered my writing professor’s pointed question: What’s the point in doing it, then?

Perhaps a hint lies in something Professor Kober wrote, on the occasion of publicly correcting a scholar whose work didn’t meet her own exacting standards: “I hope he will not be too annoyed with my review, but I feel that in scholarly matters, the truth must always be told.”

One hopes she found the pursuit of truth to be its own reward.

Enough of one, anyway.