7 of the Biggest Literary Hoaxes in History

Across history, overly ambitious writers and calculating fraudsters have managed to con their way into literary acclaim. Whether it be through the generous embellishments of a personal memoir or the construction of a totally false persona, these “authors” managed to fool readers and reviewers alike.

Some for mere profit and others for critical acclaim, each of these hoaxes illustrates how far some are willing to go for a little bit of literary limelight.

1. Go Ask Alice (1971)
2. Lee Israel
3. A Million Little Pieces (2003)
4. Nasdijj
5. Autobiography of Howard Hughes (1971)
6. Vortigern and Rowena (1796)
7. The Sokal Affair

Go Ask Alice (1971)

Originally published and presented as the actual diary of a young, drug-addicted teenage girl,
Go Ask Alice is a 1971 book chronicling the unnamed protagonist’s gradual descent into
substance abuse and depravity.

Borrowing its title from a line in the Jefferson Airplane song “White Rabbit,” Go Ask Alice was initially published anonymously, but questions about the true identity of the author led many to believe the book was in fact authored by Beatrice Sparks, a puritanical con artist notorious for publishing fabricated “diaries” of troubled teens. Sparks’s “diaries” often dealt with topical issues like drug addiction, sexuality, and abuse to serve as cautionary tales for her young target demographic.

Shortly after Go Ask Alice’s publication, Sparks began making public appearances promoting
the book, claiming she was the book’s editor and leading some to begin speculating the book
was in fact a work of fiction penned by Sparks.

Despite this, Go Ask Alice was initially reviewed with almost universal acclaim, primarily due to its presentation as the actual diary of a teenage girl, not a fictional work to be examined for its literary merit. Despite the work’s dubious authenticity, Go Ask Alice went on to sell millions of copies and has remained in print since its publication more than half a century ago.

Though Sparks’s work was certainly a commercial success, Go Ask Alice reads as almost
laughably heavy-handed by today’s standards and has largely been discounted as a valuable account of drug addiction.

Shortly after the publication of Go Ask Alice, Sparks released another anonymous “diary” she
had “edited,” called Jay’s Journal. Capitalizing on the nascent Satanic Panic of the 1980s, Jay’s
Journal followed a teenage boy on his foray into the occult. Unlike Go Ask Alice, some of Jay’s
Journal was lifted from the real diary of Alden Brooks, a teenager who had struggled with depression and died by suicide at the age of 16.

After Jay’s Journal was published, Brooks’s family was appalled by the book, claiming Sparks had completely fabricated all mentions of Satanism and the occult appearing in the book.

Lee Israel

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, writer Lee Israel carved out a successful career for herself as
a journalist and biographer. But after penning a widely panned, unauthorized biography about
American cosmetics mogul Estée Lauder, Israel’s writing career began to flounder, forcing her to
turn to wage labor and literary forgery to make ends meet.

In 1991, armed with a collection of antique typewriters, Israel began creating hundreds of forged letters from literary giants like Dorothy Parker and Tennessee Williams, alongside prominent figures in the entertainment industry like actors Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn.

Handpicking figures whose writing style and wit she’d felt she could easily mimic, Israel also began stealing authentic letters from libraries and archives and replacing them with her own forgeries so she could fence the originals. Though Israel created upwards of 400 forged letters, she typically sold them for between $50 and $100, allowing her to fly under the radar for as long as she did.

However, when Israel’s reputation for pawning off fakes began to circulate among collectors, her
forgery business came tumbling down, ultimately culminating in her 1993 conviction on charges
of conspiracy to transport stolen property.

Despite her conviction, Israel held a great sense of pride for her forgeries, describing them as her “best work” in her controversial 2008 memoir Can You Ever Forgive Me?. Following Israel’s death in late 2014, her memoir was adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film directed by Marielle Heller and starring actress Melissa McCarthy as Israel.

A Million Little Pieces (2003)

During a January 2006 appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, author James Frey was confronted by Winfrey about the alleged fabrications appearing in his 2003 memoir, A Million Little Pieces. Frey’s New York Times best-selling “memoir,” a chronicling of his life-shattering drug addiction and subsequent recovery, was promoted by Winfrey through her book club in 2005, just a few months before a scathing exposé published by The Smoking Gun revealed Frey had fabricated or exaggerated significant portions of the book.

Though some had speculated on A Million Little Pieces’s dubious authenticity prior, The Smoking Gun’s bombshell report offered irrefutable proof that Frey had seriously misled his readers. After it was revealed Frey had lied about being incarcerated and had seriously embellished key details surrounding his arrest, Frey was dropped by his literary manager, reportedly losing out on a lucrative seven-figure deal he’d secured prior to the controversy.

Though Winfrey later apologized to Frey for ambushing him with the allegations of deception,
Frey found himself back in hot water once more in 2010 when it was alleged that his YA publishing
company, Full Fathom Five, had made a practice of taking advantage of eager MFA students to
churn out commercially viable young adult novels under Frey’s imprint.

Nasdijj

Not long after the Frey debacle, the “Navajo” writer Nasdijj’s award-winning memoirs depicting his challenging childhood on a Native American reservation came under similar scrutiny.

Catalyzed by an investigation by Matthew Fleischer for LA Weekly, the supposedly Native American memoirist was revealed to be the pseudonym of Tim Barrus, a white author from Michigan. Prior to finding success writing as Nasdijj, Barrus had carved out a career for himself as a writer of gay erotica. Between 2000 and 2004, Barrus published three ostensibly nonfiction memoirs chronicling Nasdijj’s life growing up on a Navajo reservation and the loss of his adopted son to fetal alcohol syndrome.

Prior to the LA Weekly piece publicly revealing Nasdijj’s true identity, the author’s second
memoir, The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping, had been in the early stages of being adapted into
a film by Paramount International Television Group. That is, before inconsistencies in the memoir’s depiction of Navajo customs led some working on the film to suspect the book was fraudulent,
prompting producers to ultimately abandon the project. Unsurprisingly, Nasdijj’s exposure garnered countless accusations of cultural appropriation and totally obliterated any literary acumen Barrus has accrued under the nom de plume.

In 2006, Esquire, the magazine that had first published Nasdijj back in 1999 and helped galvanize his brief stint in the spotlight, published an interview with Barrus, where the author semi-apologized for his actions and made additional dubious statements about his own biography.

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Autobiography of Howard Hughes (1971)

Upon the publication of a purportedly authorized autobiography of reclusive eccentric Howard
Hughes, journalist and author Clifford Irving found himself at the center of a maelstrom of
controversy.

Hughes, a titanic mogul in the film and aviation industries, had largely retreated from public life by the close of the 1950s, leading Irving to erroneously believe the famed millionaire would not resurface to deem his book libelous. After convincing publisher McGraw-Hill that Hughes was in cooperation with Irving on the project, the author was able to secure a large advance for both himself in Hughes, having Hughes’s share of the advance deposited into a phony Swiss bank account opened by his wife.

To Irving’s surprise, when Hughes became aware of the project, he arranged a televised meeting with journalists to totally disavow the project, claiming he’d never met or corresponded with Irving. While Irving had initially denied Hughes’s claims, his plot quickly unraveled as the “autobiography” he’d been planning to release was outed as a complete fabrication.

Shortly after Irving’s deception had been revealed, both he and his wife Edith were indicted on charges of fraud and conspiracy. After confessing to forging correspondence with Hughes and faking the “autobiography”, both Edith and Clifford were given prison sentences of six months and two and a half years, respectively.

After serving just over a year and a half of his sentence, Irving was released from prison and
went on to publish The Hoax, a memoir chronicling the Hughes imbroglio. The book was later adapted into a film of the same name starring Richard Gere as Irving and Marcia Gay Harden as his wife Edith. Ironically, Irving disliked the film’s characterization of him and distanced himself from the project.

Vortigern and Rowena (1796)

In late 1794, notorious English forger William Henry Ireland proclaimed he was in possession of
a heretofore unpublished play by the Bard himself, William Shakespeare. Titled Vortigern and
Rowena, the play is a rote tale of political intrigue and ambition based on the real-life figures for
which is named: Vortigern, a 5th-century British warlord, and Rowena, a Saxon princess
romantically entangled with Vortigern.

After forging documents to support his claims of the play’s authenticity, Ireland sold the rights for
the play’s first production to playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Despite having some initial
reservations about the play’s legitimacy due to its comparatively simplistic language and
anticlimactic conclusion, Sheridan went forward with the production, staging it at London’s
historic Drury Lane Theatre in April 1796.

By the time the play staged what would be its first and last performance for more than two centuries, Shakespearean scholar Edmond Malone had published an extensive study declaring the play a hoax, priming audiences to admonish the work. After audience members and even some of the cast turned against the production, it wouldn’t be staged again until its revival as a comedy by the Pembrook Players in 2008.

The Sokal Affair

In 1996, physicist and New York University professor Alan Sokal submitted an article titled
“Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” to
Duke University’s academic journal, Social Text. Featured in the journal’s spring/summer 1996 edition called “Science Wars,” Sokal’s paper sought to argue that quantum gravity (a theory aiming to understand gravity at its most granular level) was a social construct. The only problem? It was total bologna.

Sokal, a staunch public critic of what he saw as many academic publications’ total lack of comprehensive intellectual rigor, had authored the entire paper with the express purpose of having it published to expose the seriously lacking review process in academic journals. Overloading the paper with scientific jargon and nonsensical language, Sokal said he believed the paper illustrated that academic publications like Social Text were more interested in publishing work that both solidified their position as figures of academic authority and easily aligned with their preestablished worldview.

Shortly after the paper’s publication in Social Text, Sokal revealed to Lingua Franca magazine
that he’d orchestrated the entire hoax to demonstrate his point. Sokal’s admission launched a
media frenzy surrounding the credibility of academic publications across the United States.

Social Text initially defended its inclusion of the piece, stating the issue was not peer reviewed
and that they’d relied on Sokal as an academic to confirm the veracity of his claims. A year after
the scandal broke, Sokal coauthored the book Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science, expounding his stance.