These Literary Hoaxers Were Also Full Of Hot Air

Granted, they probably wouldn't garner the cable ratings of the balloon boy shenanigans, but a good literary hoax often comes with its own special intrigue. The Nation has covered a few of them in its arts pages. I've got two here. The first was the story of Thomas Chatterton, an eighteenth-century writer who claimed to have discovered the literary works of a fifteenth-century poet priest named Thomas Rowley. The problem was there was no Thomas Rowley (or there may have been in England, but he wasn't a poet). Chatterton was Rowley, although not for very long. Chatterton killed himself with an arsenic cocktail a few months before he turned 18 -- more than two hundred years before he could have confessed his sins on Larry King.

Like the balloon boy story, Clifford Irving turned out to be full of hot air. His fake autobiography of Howard Hughes was set to be published by McGraw-Hill, until Hughes himself briefly stepped out of seclusion to denounce the book as a fraud. This was a huge story in 1972, featuring as it did a reclusive zillionaire, a secret Swiss bank account, even your basic bikini-clad blonde, Nina Van Pallandt. Irving ended up in jail, but at least he got a book deal out of it, and he didn't even have to cry his eyes out on Oprah.

Have a question about any aspect of The Nation's archives or its history? Drop me a line at jeff.kisseloff@gmail.com To be notified of new posts to this blog, follow me on twitter @jeffisme.

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