Brandon points out two interesting discussions of literary faking and hoaxing, both taking off from this 2001 article in the Guardian. I'd add one more significant hoax: the Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk (1836). Amazingly, that book is still going strong in some extreme fundamentalist circles, although the hoax was exposed--by Protestants!--just a few years after it appeared.
Everyone puts down Ossian, but it's hard to think of a greater literary work by a (sometime) Floridian. McPherson is the Delius of literature.
Posted by: Andre Mayer | November 04, 2005 at 08:43 AM