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With the recent Obama plagiarism flap dominating the media, we figured it’d be a good time to revisit a few other famous cases of word borrowing.
1. Martin Luther King Jr: I Heard a Dream (Which Subsequently Became My Dream)
When writing about the Lord God Almighty, one is generally well advised not to break the eighth commandment, but Martin Luther King Jr. managed to turn out pretty well in spite of his tendency to borrow others’ words without attribution. King received a doctorate in systematic theology from Boston University in 1955 on the strength of a dissertation comparing the theologians Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Weiman. In a 1989–1990 review, though, the university discovered that King had plagiarized about a third of his thesis from a previous student’s dissertation. And although it was closer to liberal adaptation than outright plagiarism, King’s seminal “I Have a Dream” speech was, well, let’s say “inspired by” a speech that an African American preacher named Archibald Carey Jr. gave to the Republican National Convention in 1952.
2. Alex Haley and the Roots of Roots
Haley initially gained prominence for being the “as told to” author behind The Autobiography of Malcolm X and then went on to publish the epic Roots: The Saga of an American Family in 1976, supposedly a true story that traced Haley’s ancestry back to an African man, Kunta Kinte. Haley won a Pulitzer the next year, and the book was made into a wildly popular miniseries. After the book’s publication, though, Haley admitted that he made up large swaths of the Roots story and, in a further embarrassment, was sued by author Harold Courlander for plagiarism. Haley acknowledged
lifting (accidentally, he claimed) three paragraphs from Courlander’s work and settled the suit out of court.
3. Stendhal: The Politician’s Plagiarist
When asked by Oprah Winfrey about his favorite book during the 2000 presidential campaign, Al Gore cited Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, a novel set in post-Napoleonic France. The book’s protagonist, Julien Sorel, is an ambitious young womanizer who adopts the hypocrisy of his time in order to move up in the world. In his own time, Stendhal, whose real name was Henri Beyle, was most famous not for his novels, but for his books about art and travel. In one, The Lives of Haydn, Mozart and Metastasio, Stendhal plagiarized extensively from two previous biographies. Confronted with overwhelming evidence of theft, Stendhal added forgery to the list of his literary crimes, manufacturing correspondence in the hopes of exonerating himself.
4. John Milton: In His Own Words
Was the half-blind creator of Paradise Lost a plagiarist? Well, no. But William Lauder, an 18th-century scholar, sure wanted you to think so. Bitter about his professional failures, Lauder published several essays in 1747 claiming to “prove” that Milton had stolen almost all of Paradise Lost from various 17th-century poets. One problem, though. Lauder had forged the poems, interpolating text from Paradise Lost into the original documents. For a while, many (including the great Samuel Johnson) supported Lauder, but it soon became clear by studying extant copies of the old poems that Lauder, not Milton, was the cheat. And cheating, at least in this case, didn’t pay: Exiled to the West Indies, Lauder died an impoverished shopkeeper.
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Comments (11)
Comment
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Some other great plagiarists include good old Mark Twain, who would literally cut and paste whole sections of travel books into his own manuscripts to fill page quotas. (His books back then were sold by subscription, and his publishers thought that the rubes who shelled out good money for a book would want a HEFTY book.)
And of course don’t forget poor old Joe Biden, who had his 1988 campaign for the Democratic Presidential Nomination derailed when it was discovered that he’d plagiarized a Neil Kinnock speech.
posted by Brendan on 2-19-2008 at 10:10 am
Complete Plagiarism: (quoting The University of British Columbia policy on plagiarism, which uses a MLK student paper as an example of the most serious kind of plagiarism, complete or near-complete transcription of another author’s work) [This example is drawn from a longer discussion regarding plagiarism in the graduate school essays of Martin Luther King Jr. Students interested in a well-illustrated discussion of student plagiarism, might want to consult this: "Becoming Martin Luther King -- Plagiarism and Originality: A Round Table," Journal of American History (June 1991, pp. 11-123. The example used below is on p. 25.]
So what King did was in fact “outright plagiarism”, rather than “liberal adaptation”. A good place to start looking into this, is snopes. And wikipedia has an introduction under “Martin Luther King, Jr. authorship issues” as well.
posted by Boozer Quoter on 2-19-2008 at 10:26 am
Boozer – I think the “liberal adaptation” referred to the “I have a Dream” speech, not to the dissertation.
posted by Julie on 2-19-2008 at 11:45 am
I was an MFA acting student at CSULB back in the early 90’s. We had a frustrated playwright as our chairman who was constantly forcing our department to produce his terribly written plays.
Well one day, lo and behold, my roommate was thumbing through a Calvin & Hobbes collection and find a 4-plate comic that read, word for word, as a bit of dialog found in our play. This was not the only time he was caught, but by far the most humorous.
posted by Matty on 2-19-2008 at 12:42 pm
Here’s another another one: JFK’s “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country” was actually penned by Khalil Gibran a Lebanese-American poet in his novel “The Prophet.”
posted by pam on 2-19-2008 at 12:50 pm
Meh, who really has new ideas these days anyway?
:-)
By the by, they engraved the place where MLK stood to give “I Have a Dream” on the steps on the Lincoln Memorial. I used to love going and standing there when I was a DC intern.
posted by Julia on 2-19-2008 at 1:48 pm
Can I be exiled to the West Indies, too? It’s really cold here in the Upper Midwest.
posted by Paul Crewe on 2-19-2008 at 2:07 pm
You can be exiled here, but really you don’t want to. We do have hurricanes.
posted by Laura on 2-19-2008 at 6:58 pm
“The Red and the Black” was an AWFUL book.
posted by Moon on 2-20-2008 at 7:37 pm
My latin teacher told us that “The only thing that we have to fear is fear itself” was actually a quote from an ancient Roman orater, tho I cant remember which one so I cant really back that up
posted by Rob on 2-26-2008 at 1:13 pm
Moon, I completely agree with you about “The Red and the Black.” I had to read it in 10th grade in the original French (I lived in France at the time- it wasn’t that far-fetched.). That book is just awful. I wanted to kill whoever decided to make us read it. And I love reading.
posted by greenstrawberries on 2-27-2008 at 3:59 am