Margaret B. Jones published “Love and Consequences” in 2008 as a memoir of her life as an abused half-black, half-Native foster child when in reality she is a white woman from a middle-class neighborhood.
“Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years” was written by Misha Defonseca in 1997. The book was a bestseller and was translated into 18 languages and made into a movie in France. However, the author admitted in February 2008 that her story of walking across Europe with a pack of wolves during the Holocaust was not true. Apparently, she’s not even Jewish.
James Frey wrote his 2003 memoir, A Million Little Pieces, about a 23-year-old alcoholic drug addict who manages to get his life back on track with the help of a Twelve Step-oriented treatment center. Frey eventually admitted to making up large portions of the book and left Oprah ripped off apologizing to the world for defending him. Although the book publisher was forced to refund dissatisfied customers, the book continues to sell as a work of fiction.
JT LeRoy, aka Laura Albert… not only chose a pen name, but invented a false background and even sent a friend to impersonate LeRoy on book tours. Albert maintained the double life of an HIV-positive, drug-addicted ex-hustler for several years and managed to pull off a few blockbusters (“Sarah” and “The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things”) before the hammer fell. .
Timothy Patrick Barrus wrote three ‘memoirs’ under the pseudonym Nasdijj: “Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams” (2000), “The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping” (2003) and “Geronimo’s Bones: a memory of my brother”. and I” (2004). Within them, he claimed to be of Navajo descent with abusive parents until LA Weekly broke the story.
In 1999, Michael Pelligrino tricked US publisher Simon & Schuster into thinking he was Michael Gambino, grandson of mobster Carlo Gambino, and went on to write ‘The Honored Society’, a book purportedly based on his own experiences as a gangster. The pack of lies was exposed when a legitimate member of the Gambino family found out about the book and had his lawyers blow the whistle.
Binjamin Wilkomirski (also known as Bruno Grosjean) wrote “Fragments,” a purported memoir about the Holocaust, in 1996. The book recalled the horrors of two Nazi death camps in Poland and won the National Jewish Book Award for an autobiography. In 1999, a historian investigated the allegations against the author and discovered that Wilkomirski was actually a Swiss man named Bruno Grosjean who had never been in a camp.
Anthony Godby Johnson was credited for writing “A Rock and a Hard Place” in 1993. The story involves a 14-year-old boy with HIV who describes being sexually abused. A group of journalists eventually discovered that Anthony did not exist and that the story was entirely fictional. The novel had been written by Vicki Fraginals, who claimed to be Anthony’s adoptive mother and posed as the fictional boy in telephone interviews.
Marlo Morgan caused a stir among Australian Aboriginal groups when he published “Mutant Message Down Under” in 1994. The book claimed to be a memoir of his time with Aboriginal people. After a series of protests from Aboriginal groups, claims that Morgan invented much of the book, and musings that suggest he may never have set foot on the mainland, the book is now being published as fiction.
Forbidden Love (also called Honor Lost in the United States) was written by Norma Khouri (pen name of Norma Bagain Toliopoulos). It is the story of a Jordanian writer friend whose love for a Christian soldier had been kept a secret from her Muslim father due to a religious conflict. When her father finally finds out and consequently stabs his daughter to death in a so-called honor killing. In 2004, Sydney Morning Herald journalist Malcolm Knox discovered the book to be a hoax, leaving us with yet another work of fiction.
Asa Cater, a white member of the Ku Klux Klan, published “The Little Tree Education” in 1977 under the pseudonym Forrest Carter. The book is described as a memoir of Carter, a Cherokee orphan who battled racism and struggled to find his heritage. In the 1990s, Asa was found to be the actual author of the book, and the publishers reclassified it as fiction. It was at this point that Oprah removed the book from her selection list.
Clifford Irving forged letters and signatures and created fake names for Swiss bank accounts in an attempt to win $750,000 for writing a fake biography of reclusive Howard Hughes.
“Go Ask Alice” by Anonymous is the diary of a teenage girl who died of a drug overdose, published as a warning to discourage reckless teenagers from following in her footsteps. However, it was eventually revealed that the book’s “editor”, Beatrice Sparks, was also the book’s author and that the unnamed girl was, in fact, fictional. The controversy did not deter Sparks, who went on to produce many other similar “diaries” about troubled teens.
historical hoaxes
Maria Monk’s book “Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, or, The Hidden Secrets of a
Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed” was published in January 1836. The book is about the seven years Monk spent in the Hôtel-Dieu convent, where he was forced to have sex with priests who killed the illegitimate babies and made them disappear. to the uncooperative nuns. After several investigations, it was found that the descriptions of the buildings in the book did not match the actual building, and that the book’s claims were false. It is believed that the publishers may have doctored her for the role.
In the 1840s, the Reverend Johann Wilhelm Meinhold claimed to have discovered a manuscript written by Abraham Schweidler, a former minister of the old Coserow Church. Meinhold later published the story of Mary Schweidler: The Amber Witch in German as a factually based instructional document on avoiding witchcraft. Critics believed it to be authentic, and it was only in later editions that the author admitted that it was a work of fiction. This book contains a hoax within a hoax, as the English translator Lady Duff-Gordon credited herself as the author in 1861 and denied the original German edition until later discovered.
In the late 18th century, Thomas Chatterton claimed to have found poems written by a 15th-century monk named Thomas Rowley. When it was discovered that Chatterton had written them himself, the young poet panicked and committed suicide with arsenic. His work was finally published after his death and became a beacon of inspiration for Romantic poets around the world.
Also in the 1700s, James Macpherson claimed a translation of the 3rd-century Gaelic epic poet Ossian, it took almost a century to prove that Macpherson had written them himself.
hoaxes designed to expose
In an effort to show how literature in America had become unthinkingly vulgar, a group of Newsday writers wrote “Naked Came the Stranger” in 1969, going into explicit detail about the sexual escapades of a suburban housewife. When it was discovered that author Penelope Ashe was, in fact, 25 Newsday writers, the book’s sales were unchanged.
A group of science fiction writers got together in 2005 to write a book so bad any proper publisher would find it unpublishable. Each chapter of Atlanta Nights was written by a different author, including chapter 12 and chapter 34, which was written by a computer program. The only chapter not written by a different author was the non-existent chapter 21. The project was to prove PublishAmerica’s claim that they were a traditional publisher of high-quality work, the manuscript was accepted but once the hoax was revealed , they reevaluated his decision and he ultimately rejected the book. The group of authors then self-published the book about a lark under the pen name Travis Tea.
Ern Malley was not an Australian mechanic turned poet, but the brainchild of James McAuley and Harold Stewart. The poet couple wrote a set of poems and created an elaborate, if bogus, backstory for Erm Malley. As expected, the poems were published in an effort to discredit the Australian poetry magazine Angry Penguins. All events played out as planned and Erm Malley remains one of Australia’s biggest literary hoaxes.
In the mid-1950s, New York radio personality Jean Shepherd was outraged by the way the best-seller charts were created. At the time, the lists were made up of books sold and book orders at a bookstore. Shepherd urged listeners to go to their local bookstores to demand Frederick C. Ewing’s “I, Libertine,” when neither the book nor the author existed. The gag caused a sensation and she convinced the bestseller list makers that her methods were out of date and she also got Sheppard to sign a contract to write the bogus book.
