Writing Wrongs

Illustration by Jillian Tamaki

Earlier this week, news broke of two literary fakeries. On Sunday, an exhaustive exposé on the Smoking Gun website alleged that bad-boy writer James Frey exaggerated and fabricated details in his best-selling addiction-and-redemption memoir — and current Oprah Book Club pick – A Million Little Pieces. It seems Frey’s violent and drug-addled youth — which the book at once embraces with a macho swagger and denounces with pious contrition — might not have been as harrowing or eventful as written.

On Monday, the New York Times reported that HIV-positive, androgynous author JT Leroy was himself a fictional creation. It appears 25-year-old Leroy’s “autobiographical” fiction about his life as a truck-stop hustler and homeless drug addict is actually the work of Laura Albert, the 40-year-old woman Leroy claims rescued him from the street. Meanwhile, Albert’s sister-in-law, Savannah Knoop, has been exposed as the mysterious figure in wigs and sunglasses that makes public appearances as Leroy, who along the way has befriended celebrities like Courtney Love, Billy Corgan and writer Mary Gaitskill.

Writers with a hard-luck memoir in the works may want to wait until the dust settles before approaching a publisher. With both of these swindles, industry insiders have spent the week alternately claiming they “suspected all along” that something was up and nervously defending their fact-checking processes. As for the rest of us, we can sit back and relish the juicy details of the latest incidents in the long, illustrious history of literary hoaxes. Here are 10 of the best.

Thomas Chatterton, from an engraving by W. Ridgway. Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

The poetry of Thomas Chatterton
In 1769, a Bristol apprentice and teenage literary prodigy named Thomas Chatterton exploited the era’s passion for Medieval literature by penning a collection of poems he claimed to be the work of a 15 th-century monk named Thomas Rowley. Although the work was greatly praised, when some experts raised questions about its legitimacy, Chatterton panicked and took his own life. When the truth was revealed, Chatterton was posthumously hailed as a major talent and became a beloved hero of Romantic poets.

Scotland’s Homer
While Chatterton was fooling the Brits, a Scottish schoolmaster named James Macpherson produced “translations” of the Gaelic verse of third-century epic poet Ossian, whose stories of heroism and love wowed primitivists like Napoleon and Goethe. Though there were some early skeptics — Samuel Johnson among them — it took almost another century before the translations were proven to be fake.

Ern Malley’s The Darkening Ecliptic
In 1944, an Australian poetry editor published a collection of poems by a raw young talent named Ern Malley, a Melbourne mechanic who had died the previous year. The editor lauded Malley as one of the most “important poetic figures of this century.” Alas, the verses had been written as a joke by a pair of poetry purists: James McAuley and Harold Stewart penned Malley’s entire body of work in one afternoon, pulling phrases randomly from books and making it purposely obscure. Their mission was to reveal what they felt was the “gradual decay” and absurdity of avant-garde poetry. The hoax became national news and was the inspiration for Peter Carey’s 2003 novel My Life As a Fake.

Clifford Irving. Photo Fred Mott/Evening Standard/Getty Images.

The Howard Hughes biography
In 1970, U.S. novelist Clifford Irving cooked up a scheme with fellow writer Richard Suskind to write a fake biography of reclusive aviation and film mogul Howard Hughes. Irving landed a $750,000 advance from publisher McGraw-Hill, and with Suskind’s help, made up interviews and fabricated documents with Hughes’s forged signature. They were eventually discovered — Hughes even came out of his self-imposed exile to condemn them, claiming never to have met Irving. Both Irving and Suskind served time in jail.

Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree
One of the stranger hoaxes. Published in 1977, Forrest Carter’s celebrated memoir about a Cherokee orphan who fights racism and struggles to connect with his heritage was later revealed to have been written by a white Ku Klux Klan member named Asa Carter. (In more recent reprints, The Education of Little Tree was labeled “fiction.”) Carter had previously worked for Alabama Governor George Wallace, penning his infamous inauguration speech, in which Wallace vowed: “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw a line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say: segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.”

Go Ask Alice
This 1971 “actual diary” of a teenaged girl who died of a drug overdose was meant to be a cautionary tale for adolescents in the post-hippie era. In the late 1970s, however, its “editor,” Beatrice Sparks, a psychologist and Mormon youth counsellor, admitted to writing it based on the stories of some of her students. Sparks has gone on to produce many other “actual diaries” about troubled adolescents, including Treacherous Love: The Diary of an Anonymous Teenager and Annie's Baby: The Diary of an Anonymous Pregnant Teenager.

The so-called authentication for the Hitler diaries. Photo Michael Urban/AFP/Getty Images.

The Hitler Diaries
In 1983, the German magazine Stern announced that journalist Gerd Heidemann made the greatest Nazi memorabilia find of all time: Adolf Hitler’s diary, a whopping 62-volume set covering the crucial years of 1932 to 1945. Despite containing cornball entries like “must not forget to get tickets for the Olympic Games for Eva Braun” (or maybe because of that), the diaries were authenticated by several respected historians. Within days of the story breaking, however, a forensic study of the actual paper stock confirmed that the diaries could not have been penned in the ’30s and ’40s, and were thus fake. They had been written by a Stuttgart forger named Konrad Kujau; both he and Heidemann served time in prison.

Crad Kilodney. Photo courtesy Syd Allan.

Crad Kilodney’s CanLit submissions
For years, this abrasive, eccentric writer had a reputation for selling his books (sample titles: Excrement, Mental Cases and Putrid Scum) on the streets of Toronto. In 1988, he perpetrated what he called the “biggest literary hoax in Canadian history.” Disguised as original work by unknown amateurs, Kilodney submitted poetry and short stories by famous CanLit figures to various publishers and literary contests. All the work was rejected. An editor at Montreal’s Vehicule Press, which received a collection of Irving Layton poems written under the name Herman Mlunga Mbongo, did send a nice rejection letter, noting, “Irving Layton, to whom I showed your manuscript, was as delighted as I was to see how useful his poems still are.”

Anthony Godby Johnson’s Rock and A Hard Place
This grim 1993 “memoir,” by a 14-year-old HIV-positive survivor who endured ritual sexual abuse, dazzled several writers, including Paul Monette and Armistead Maupin, who championed the young author. But suspicions quickly arose when Johnson refused to appear in public (he would only speak to people on the phone). Reporters began to notice a similarity between Johnson’s voice and that of his “foster mother” Vicki Fraginals; a New Yorker story by Tad Friend stopped just short of proving Fraginals and Johnson were one and the same. Maupin wrote about the betrayal in his 2000 novel The Night Listener.

Andreas Karavis (aka David Solway's dentist). Courtesy Vehicule Press.

Andreas Karavis
In a 1999 feature in Books in Canada, Montreal poet David Solway celebrated the work of a newly discovered Greek poet named Andreas Karavis, complete with an interview and a photograph. Solway claimed that he had hunted the reclusive fisherman-poet for years until he finally met him in 1991; he claimed he had begun to translate the Greek’s poems in 1993. Karavis’s fame soon spread. There were parties for the launch of his books, including one at Montreal’s Greek embassy in 2000, where Karavis appeared in person, wearing a navy blue fisherman’s cap. Soon after, Montreal journalist Matthew Hays (a contributor to CBC.ca) wrote a column in the Globe and Mail raising questions about Karavis’s real identity. Solway admitted that he had invented the man, written his poems and had charmed his dentist into playing Karavis at the party.

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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