Franz Kafka, big fat liar. see also: Osama bin Laden's Diary

[by Tom McNichol]

The literary world has been rocked by a pair of hoaxes. Acclaimed author JT LeRoy appears to be a 40 year-old middle class woman, not a 25-year-old HIV-positive former male prostitute as claimed. And James Frey's best-selling memoir of drug abuse, imprisonment, and redemption, A Million Little Pieces, has been revealed as more fiction than fact

But literary hoaxes are nothing new. Such ruses come and go, and readers quickly forget what all the fuss was about. See how many of these literary hoaxes of the past you can remember:

1984 by George Orwell
This book was published in 1949, some 35 years before the events in the book are alleged to have taken place, so it's impossible for the author to have witnessed any of the lurid scenes he describes in the book.  Furthermore, the supposed author of the book, "George Orwell," is actually an essayist and one time Burma policeman named Eric Blair.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
This 1869 book is one in a series of elaborate hoaxes perpetrated by "Jules Verne" (if that is his real name). In this work, the author claims to have witnessed humans in a submarine diving 20,000 leagues (or 69,046 miles) under the sea, clearly an impossibility. That didn't stop the same author from publishing additional literary pranks
describing similarly preposterous adventures, including journeying to the center of the earth (where the temperature is 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit) and circumnavigating the world in 80 days, decades before the advent of air travel.

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
A blatant hoax; the subject of the novel, the so-called "catcher in the rye", appears only in one brief passage. The rest of the novel is padded with an entirely different story about a troubled youth named Holden Caulfield. Repeated attempts over the past 40 years to confront the supposed author, "J.D. Salinger", about inconsistencies in the
work have been unsuccessful. "Salinger" hasn't been seen in public in decades, and it's doubtful he even exists.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A close reading of the work reveals that Gatsby wasn't all that great.

Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
Despite the title, this book by "Henry Fielding" has nothing whatsoever to do with Tom Jones, the sexy Welsh nightclub singer whose hits include "It's Not Unusual" and "What's New Pussycat?" Instead, the work is padded out with a musty tale involving Squire Allworthy who finds a baby boy in his bed; the boy in turn later falls in love with Sophia, the daughter of Allworthy's neighbor, Squire Western, who wants Sophia to marry Blifil, whom Sophia can't stand. A few spirited verses of "What's New Pussycat?" would have saved this sad fraud.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
The nameless narrator of the book, who describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, and moving to New York to become chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood", is clearly visible throughout the entire book.

Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Evidence has been unearthed that this book was first published in 1936, a full three years before the release of the film Gone with the Wind starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. Obviously, a tie-in book to the movie could not have been written a full three years before the film was released, a sloppy literary hoax that nevertheless went undetected for years.

Middlemarch by George Eliot
The author of this otherwise well-regarded tale of a small English town on the eve of the Reform Bill of 1832 is not the impressive-sounding "George Eliot," but rather some chick named Mary Ann Evans.

Gutenberg's Bible
The alleged author, Johann Gutenberg, apparently didn't write a word of it.

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The first line of this 1915 literary hoax should have been a tip-off: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into a giant insect." Medical journals of the era record no case of a man being turned into a giant cockroach, and no reputable peer-reviewed study has demonstrated how the complex DNA sequence of a human being could possibly be simplified to create an
insect that still retained limited motor skills. The recent stem cell cloning hoax in South Korea is merely an updated version of this venerable ruse by "Kafka."

Ulysses by James Joyce
This elaborate hoax is supposedly the story of a day in the life of a Dublin man named Leopold Bloom. In fact, the book is full of gibberish and made-up words that do little to move the story along, and the alleged protagonist of the work, "Ulysses," is nowhere to be found. The hoax went undetected for decades until someone finally read the book all the way through.

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