Tuesday January 10, 2006

More Famous Literary Liars

Recent revelations about the truthfulness of authors JT LeRoy and James Frey have sent the book world reeling. But we would do well to remember that some of America’s brightest literary lights were sometimes less than honest about their work and themselves. For example:

Walt Whitman
Whitman’s “Song of Myself” was not actually about himself, but about a blond neighbor boy named Todd.

Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau never actually stayed at Walden Pond, relying instead on the observations of a series of stringers and unpaid interns—although he did briefly touchdown at the Concord airport to “get the dateline.”

Emily Dickinson
The Belle of Amherst was, in fact, a man. A tiny, nervous man.

Mark Twain
Mark Twain was actually a much uglier person named Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Or the other way around. I can never remember.

T.S. Eliot
Despite appearances, Eliot was not an insufferable British snob. He was an insufferable snob from Missouri.

Ernest Hemingway
While Hemingway set out to serve in the Ambulance Corps during World War I, he got no closer to action than the 1918 Wimp Convention and Exposition in Gibraltar, where he delivered an influential (if later suppressed) treatise on fleeing. His famous wartime injury was reportedly the result of “power tanning.”

Posted by jim at 06:16 AM ||