5 Accomplished Authors Who Turned Out To Be Hoaxes

But while I'm generally very pro-chasing-your-dreams, that shit always carries the potential of turning ugly when your dream is to become filthy rich, and your means to chase it is to outright lie to everyone. It's possible that Leon Carmen, a 40-something taxi driver from Sydney, Australia, was aware of this, but he had a profitable story in his head, damn it, and he wasn't about to pull the brakes. His story was about an Aboriginal girl who's brutally taken from her parents at a young age and put in a white foster family. This tragic tale of Australia's Stolen Generations was a surefire hit, but there was one minor problem: As a middle-aged white dude, Carmen's roots were firmly on the novel's antagonists' side. Realizing this would give him the credibility of a fox pitching Watership Down in publishers' eyes, Carmen devised a cunning plan: He would become the Aboriginal woman in his book.

Writing under the pseudonym "Wanda Koolmatrie" and shaping his story as an autobiography, Carmen's book, My Own Sweet Time, became a smash hit, and earned rave reviews and literary awards upon its publication in 1994. The strangely elusive Ms. Koolmatrie became the toast of the Aboriginal rights movement, and everything seemed pretty sweet.

Via Wikipedia
Must have been a good book, because no one was buying it based on the MS Paint cover.

That is, until 1997, when "Koolmatrie" offered "her" publisher a manuscript for a sequel. The publisher, presumably suspicious because they hadn't seen their star writer in person for years, decided to look a bit deeper, and soon had to do a double take as Leon emerged. I like to imagine they were aided by a van full of meddling kids and a creepily anthropomorphic Great Dane.

Although Leon Carmen insisted that he wanted to help the Aboriginal people, he did openly admit that the main motivation for his identity antics was to catch a break in the publishing business, and he believed he'd never have made it as plain old Leon. This may well be true, considering that the publishing house he frauded into putting out his novel was Magabala Books, an indigenous publishing house specializing in Aboriginal authors.

You probably know Pynchon as the reclusive author behind Inherent Vice, Vineland, and a number of other brain-bogglingly complex yet strangely funny novels. The editor who had been dealing with Tinasky's letters certainly did -- he immediately thought Pynchon's style was very similar to the purported royal hobo lady, and drew his own conclusions. Some tend to agree with him, while others argue that Tinasky was actually a pet project of an obscure beat poet. Although my personal instincts shift toward the latter, there is certainly enough circumstantial evidence pointing at Pynchon to at least raise an eyebrow or two.

Via Biblioklept
Or a tooth or 16.

I don't pretend to know who actually wrote Tinasky's sizable correspondence (80 letters in the span of 4.5 years). All I know is that their style certainly seems to match Pynchon's. What's more, that option would provide an extra layer of hilarity, as Pynchon himself has been accused of being a pseudonym of other writers, such as Don DeLillo and William Gaddis. So in a world where all conspiracies were true, we'd be treated to a hilarious smorgasbord of a reclusive writer dude pretending to be another reclusive writer dude pretending to be a reclusive bag lady. Tell me you don't secretly want a theory that hilarious to be true.

Soon, Karavis' reputation spread. Conferences on his (entirely fabricated) poetry were held in distant countries like Portugal and, yes, Greece. People started confessing to Solway -- their only link to the hermit-like Karavis -- that they'd admired the Greek poet for years, and some even proposed a Nobel prize for the guy. Solway even received a couple of postcards signed by Karavis. Even Solway's enemies did little to debunk his lies; instead they attacked "Karavis" himself, agreeing that he was a genius, but painting him as a total dick who had falsified his ancestry and dabbled in smuggling. This obviously did little to diminish his popularity. (Later, of course, it turned out said "enemies" were in on the joke all along.)

In 2000, at the height of Karavis' powers, Solway and Chouliaris threw a release party for a "translated" book of the imaginary Greek's poems. Realizing that their story was running low on cheese, they decided that Karavis needed to make a much-anticipated live appearance. So they hired Solway's dentist to prance around in a fisherman's hat and babble mock Greek.

Poike/iStock/Getty Images
"You've got great teeth��?���¢?��?���¦like a shark! Yeah, because I'm a fisherman ..."

Of course, such a con could never last. Solway's scheme was soon exposed, and he was laughed out of the literary circles of Canada. Ha, just kidding! He voluntarily revealed the hoax in a 2001 interview, laughing the whole thing off as an experiment and relishing the practical joke he'd played on his fellow Canadians, whom he described as "not very exciting people". Then, he proved his point by staying completely un-manhandled and going on to write award-winning works.

Monk's autobiography, Awful Disclosures Of Maria Monk, Or, The Hidden Secrets Of A Nun's Life In A Convent Exposed, created plenty of buzz when it was published in early 1836, largely thanks to its allusions to poor Maria's many unwilling sexual escapades in a Montreal convent. According to the book, Monk's convent of Black Nuns doubled as sex slaves for the priests in a nearby seminary, who accessed the convent through creepy secret tunnels. They even had a mass grave for babies born from these forbidden trysts (and likely uncooperative nuns as well), because of course they fucking did.

Via vwc.edu
Here's the scandalous twist: It was all income tax disclosures.

As a shock to absolutely no one, Monk's story held water for approximately 0.2 seconds, as all the decidedly un-sexed nuns and priests in the described area started wondering where all this cloth-boning was taking place, and (presumably) why nobody had told them. Monk (or rather, her ghost writer) had also thoroughly confused even the most basic facts about the convents in the area, which led most scholars to quickly dismiss the book as a fabricated fairy tale.

However, its legacy was not so easily squashed. Even back then, a certain segment of the population was Fox-News-minded enough to swallow (and, more harmfully, spread) even the most easily-spotted bullshit as fact. Maria's tale gained a life of its own, and went on to become one of those "everybody knows it's true" facts that are almost never actually true. Monk's stories had gained enough traction that they acquired a life of their own as blunt instruments in political and religious debate between protestants and Catholics.

As for Monk herself, all this did jack shit of good. She spent the remainder of her unfortunately short life periodically throwing more and more diluted accusations at the Church, but she was so thoroughly discredited that the people riding on her stories didn't actually need her anymore. And that, friends, is why it's unwise to publish bullshit.

Ah, Davy Crockett. One of the foremost frontier heroes from back when America was positively teeming with them. His wilderness shenanigans, heroic demise at the Alamo, and general manly manliness have inspired entire generations, and are the third most likely reason your grandfather sometimes wears that creepy-ass coonskin cap. Though he wasn't aware of it at the time, Crockett spent his entire life cementing his legendary status in the American lore. Which makes it pretty funny that a hack writer named Richard Penn Smith achieved the exact same thing in just 24 hours.

In 1836, small-time writer Smith, whose newspaper column was called The Plagiarist (note to humanity: learn to take a fucking hint), churned out a supposedly autobiographic book titled Col. Crockett's Exploits And Adventures In Texas: Wherein Is Contained A Full Account Of His Journey From Tennessee To The Red River And Natchitoches, And Thence Across Texas To San Antonio; Including Many Hair-Breadth Escapes; Together With A Topographical, Historical, And Political View Of Texas ... Written By Himself, presumably because This Is Totally A Truthful Account And A Real Book Written By Davy Crockett, NOT By Richard Penn Smith was already taken. The book, which you can read right here, was supposedly found after the Alamo, and it contained Crockett's own thoughts about, well, pretty much everything up until then. It also heavily played up Crockett's badassitude, really turning him into the legend we would see him as.

Konstantin Grishin/Hemera/Getty Images
"Stamps are fine and all, but could you for once call me 'David' instead of that dumbfuck nickname?"

The Totally Not Fake Davy Crockett Journal By The Man Himself And Not Me, Richard Penn Smith became a roaring success, and came to influence both the public image of the heroic Crockett and the scholars' view of the historical events it described for decades, even after Smith was outed as the true author 50 years after the initial publication. One 24-hour period rife with plagiarism and outright lies turned Davy Crockett from an American hero to an American legend.

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