When Creativity Isn’t Appreciated: Literary Hoaxes

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One thing I would really love to do is perpetrate a literary hoax. I see it as the ultimate in creativity, pulling the wool over the eyes of the gullible and, for a while, even those with a little more sense. The conundrum of a literary hoax is that you must be discovered in order to become famous for perpetrating it. That seems to be the less fun part though. But for those watching from a little distance, the people involved and the lengths they go to are fascinating.

Here are a few great literary hoaxes.

Forbidden Love

Norma Khouri wrote the book Forbidden Love (also known as Honour Lost) as a piece of non-fiction describing the murder of her Muslim best friend by her friend’s father and brother after they discovered she was dating a Christian man. It was a worldwide bestseller. But the book was full of factual errors and was exposed by an Australian journalist approximately a year later.

An absolutely enthralling documentary called Forbidden Lie$ was made in 2007 with the participation of Khouri herself, who continued to defend the story as truth, admitting only that she had changed names, dates and places to protect people. For the first half, I was absolutely convinced she was telling the truth and throughout the second half, it seemed clear that she was just a very good actor. Still, it’s a fascinating tale, particularly because she still hasn’t confessed despite mountains of evidence against her.

Ern Malley

Ern Malley was the creation of Harold Stewart and James McAuley, two Australian poets who despised the modernist poetry movement and particularly Angry Penguins, a poetry journal. In order to expose the editor, Max Harris, Stewart and McAuley created what they considered to be nonsense poems and submitted them for publication. The entire next issue of Angry Penguins was dedicated to Ern Malley and his work.

The hoax was revealed shortly after and Harris’s career was essentially destroyed but, ironically, so were the careers of Stewart and McAuley, who couldn’t shake the notoriety of being Ern Malley’s creators. There is a terrific book on the subject called The Ern Malley Affair by Michael Heyward.

The Diary of Jack the Ripper

Unbelievably, debate still rages over whether the diary of Jack the Ripper is real or a fabulous hoax twenty-five years after it was presented to the public. Is James Maybrick really Jack the Ripper or is he the world’s unluckiest man, murdered by his wife and unfairly defamed as history’s most vicious killer?

It’s about as delicious as literary hoaxes come. Read the original book by Shirley Harrison covering the “discovery” of the diary and if you can’t get enough, read the latest book by Robert Smith who is absolutely convinced it’s true.

The Hitler Diaries

Between the late seventies and the early eighties, a man named Konrad Kujau forged sixty volumes of journals and sold them for $3.7 million. It would have been a bargain at twice the price considering the supposed author was Adolf Hitler. Of course, with a little forensic analysis, they were quickly confirmed as fakes.

Both Kujau and the intermediary who stole a lot of that $3.7 million were jailed for their fraudulent activities.

JT Leroy

JT Leroy is not just a pen name but an entire persona presented as the author of three semi-autobiographical books about a teenage boy experiencing sexual abuse, drugs and poverty. The true creator was a woman named Laura Albert who was eventually sued for $350,000 for selling the film rights for the first book as JT Leroy, instead of herself.

Savannah Knoop, Albert’s sister-in-law, later wrote and published a memoir called Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT LeRoy, about how she would appear in public wearing a wig and sunglasses, pretending to be JT Leroy at Albert’s request.

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If these snapshots have merely whetted your appetite for literary hoaxes, here are some more that might satisfy you:

*A Million Little Pieces by James Frey

*The Hand That Signed the Paper by Helen Demidenko

*A Rock and a Hard Place: One Boy’s Triumphant Story by Anthony Godby Johnson

*Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival by Margaret Seltzer

*Naked Came the Stranger by Penelope Ashe

*The Autobiography of Howard Hughes by Clifford Irving

*Coffee, Tea or Me by Donald Bain

*Go Ask Alice by Anonymous

*The Education of Little Tree by Asa Carter

*The life of Dan Mallory – apparently he wrote a “memoir” but decided not to publish it, yet the fiction author has woven a web of lies about his background that are more fascinating than anything he could write as fiction – enjoy!