Ebook: Telling Tales: a History of Literary Hoaxes

Cover; Title; Copyright; Contents; Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1 The Eighteenth Century; William Lauder; James Macpherson; Thomas Chatterton; William Henry Ireland; 2 The Nineteenth Century; Maria Monk; The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; Vrain-Denis Lucas; Mark Twain; Sir Edmund Backhouse; 3 Native Americans; Grey Owl; Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance; Forrest Carter; Nasdijj; 4 Celebrity Testaments; The Abraham Lincoln Letters; The JFK Letters; The Autobiography of Howard Hughes; The Hitler Diaries; 5 Australia; Ern Malley; Nino Culotta; Marlo Morgan; Helen Demidenko; Norma Khouri.;When Dionysus the Renegade faked a Sophocles text in 400BC (cunningly inserting the acrostic 'Heraclides is ignorant of letters') to humiliate an academic rival, he paved the way for two millennia of increasingly outlandish literary hoaxers. The path from his mischievous stunt to more serious tricksters like the controversial memoirist and Oprah-duper James Frey, takes in every sort of writer: from the religious zealot to the bored student, via the vengeful academic and the out-and-out joker. But whether hoaxing for fame, money, politics or simple amusement, each perpetrator represents s.