As an apprentice to the craft of binding and restoring rare books, the author discovered the sense of pride that comes from being part of a lineage stronger than blood and the responsibility of passing on that craft to the next heir.
By the time I reached the University of Oklahoma library, I was already thirty minutes late. I took the elevator to the fifth floor, using the time to quietly think of an acceptable excuse.
Plenty of authors write from unusual places, but few can claim that they penned stories in a penitentiary. William Sydney Porter, better known by his pseudonym O. Henry, wrote many of his best known pieces from behind bars.
Born September 11, 1862 in Greensboro, North Carolina, Porter spent much of his childhood reading. His tastes were voracious and indiscriminate, as is often the case with early readers; he devoured both dime novels and classics with equal enthusiasm. Two of his favorites were Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Lace's translation of One Thousand and One Nights. Porter was tutored by his aunt throughout his youth, and after graduation he went to work at his uncle's drug store.
William Henry Ireland forged Shakespeare, and the Russian secret police fabricated records from a secret society. Literary hoaxes can be entertaining, dangerous, or humiliating. Today is our final installment on famous literary hoaxes. (Be sure to check out Part One and Part Two.)
When The Education of Little Tree was published in 1976, it was an immediate success. The book was billed as the memoir of the orphaned author, who grew up with his Cherokee grandparents. It sold over nine million copies and made school reading lists across the country. The Education of Little Tree did receive some criticism from the Cherokee tribe for its inaccurate depiction of Cherokee language and tradition, but that did little to slow sales.
Back in 400 BCE, Dionysus the Renegade was a Stoic philosopher and student of Zeno of Citium. He wanted to humiliate his rival Heraclides and decided to forge a work of Sophocles. Dionysus inserted the acrostic "Heraclides is ignorant of letters," which quickly led to the discovery of Dionysus' fraud--but not before he'd achieved his aim of embarrassing Heraclides.
"I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing."
-Seamus Heaney (All Things Considered, 2008)
Literary critics frequently argue that literature is full of frauds; there are plenty of authors, after all, whose work offers little substance or artistry. But the world of letters also has its share of true frauds: cheats, liars, and forgers. In some cases, these individuals were merely mischievous pranksters, but in others they hoped to profit from their malevolent handiwork. Here's a look at some of the biggest literary hoaxes of all time.
Today Elmore Leonard passed away at his home, surrounded by his family. The American author had recently suffered a stroke. Leonard was an incredibly prolific author who occupied the worlds of popular culture and literature.
Headquartered in New York City's iconic Flatiron building, St. Martin's Press is one of the largest publishers of English-language books in the world. The publishing house puts out approximately 700 titles per year under multiple imprints.
Macmillen Publishers of UK founded St. Martin's in 1952, naming it for St. Martin's Lane in London. The house was privately owned until the late 1990's, when it was sold to Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC.
Naipaul has said that "half a writer's work is the discovery of his subject matter. And a problem for me was that my life had been varied, full of upheavals and moves." Yet Naipaul found his authorial voice relatively early; after two failed attempts at writing a novel, Naipaul found inspiration in his childhood neighbor from Port of Spain.
