April 8, 2002

2:15 PM

Why aren't ghostwritten works considered frauds? Pop historians are on the rack for using unattributed passages, Milli Vanilla were shamed off the charts for lip-synching, Joe Klein was pilloried for playing coy about a book he did write. Yet Reagan's autobiography, Clinton's "It Takes a Village", and recent works by V. C. Andrews and Lawrence Sanders weren't written by the names on the jackets. Kind of odd, no?
posted by nikzhowz (18 comments total)

re. Andrews and Sanders, consider the product. It really never occurred to me to imagine these were real people; figured they were made-up names, like those made-up authors to whom the Harlequin romances are attributed (my favorite being "Violet Winspear," who my magic 8 ball tells me is actually named Ed Schwartz.)

re. Ron and Hillary, consider the source. I'd no more expect a book attributed to either of these folks actually to have been written by the putative author than I'd expect a book attributed to Donald Duck actually to have been written by Mr. Duck.
posted by jfuller at 2:46 PM on April 8, 2002

From now on, my posts shall be ghostwritten.
posted by fuq at 3:02 PM on April 8, 2002

I vaguely recall an episode of Conan O'Brien where Conan quizzed William Shatner on passages from one of the Star Trek books he supposedly co-authored. He neither recognized the writing nor could recount the plot; he hadn't even read it let alone written it.

In scientific writing authorship is understood to mean "intellectual contribution" and typically only one or two from a long author list has even seen the manuscript, let alone written on it. This standard would seem to apply to the Clinton books anyway.
posted by plaino at 3:08 PM on April 8, 2002

V.C. Andrews wrote the first two or three books. Then she died and turned into a brand name. Her estate farms out the writing of the rest. Look at the copyright page for the details.

Franklin W. Dixon was also a real person, for the first few volumes in the series, at least.
posted by djfiander at 3:29 PM on April 8, 2002

Most politicians don't write their own speeches or articles. Let's start with that and go from there.
posted by cx at 3:34 PM on April 8, 2002

Yeah. Did I tell y'all that I'm ghostwriting on behalf of Kevin Mitnik? He's standing behind me now telling me what to type and do and such.

He still smells like prison.
posted by Settle at 3:42 PM on April 8, 2002

The line that got crossed seems to be that those two historians has a repautation for being scholarly and fine historians. In fact, they cirbbed material and passed it off as theirs.
Most busy people get their names on books but are known not for writing but for other accomplishments and thus most readers do not expect that they were the writers of the books tghat gohost writers have written.
My best example, though, of this second category: William Bennet, Mr Ethics himself, had a book about ethics written by someone else, for which he made well over a million bucks. Ethics? I don't think he was at the time busy working at anything other than the talk show TV circuit.
posted by Postroad at 4:08 PM on April 8, 2002

Franklin W. Dixon wrote all the good Hardy Boy books. But, alas, the bastards that own the company have re-written all the books. Some of the racist/sexist/etc stuff is gone, which is probably no real loss (though, OTOH, reading the old Bobbsey Twins when they had a black maid is quite an insight into past generations). The real loss is that FWD used to use BigWords. The new books avoid challenging language like the plague: our children are now too damn stupid to be able to read challenging material.
posted by five fresh fish at 4:29 PM on April 8, 2002

I feel the need to point out that the name is "Milli Vanilli", not "Vanilla".

Thank you, that is all.
posted by Hackworth at 6:08 PM on April 8, 2002

Apparently both "Franklin W Dixon" (The Hardy Boys) and "Carolyn Keen" (Nancy Drew) were pseudonyms for writers who worked for the Stratemeyer Syndicate (just search for "stratemeyer syndicate faq" at your friendly neighourhood search engine).

And, no, Alfred Hitchcock didn't write the "Three Investigators" books either!
posted by John Shaft at 7:49 PM on April 8, 2002

They left out the rudest example of the 20th century: the Pulitzer Prize winning 'Profiles in Courage' supposedly written by John F. Kennedy, but actually written by Jules Davids, Theodore Sorensen, and others.
posted by Mack Twain at 8:30 PM on April 8, 2002

I think it's so awesome that you used the word "pilloried."
posted by RJ Reynolds at 10:13 PM on April 8, 2002

Franklin W. Dixon was also a real person, for the first few volumes in the series, at least.

As far as I know, this is not true. My information is that all the Stratemeyer authors were psedonyms from the outset. Got any documentation?
posted by rodii at 5:43 AM on April 9, 2002

As long as we're taking back Pulitzers, let's not forget Alex Haley and his penchant for stealing other's work. Relevant passage:

Haley's account of his family history was challenged in several highly publicized instances. In 1978, Haley admitted that some passages from another author's novel on slavery had "found their way" into "Roots," and he paid the author $650,000 in an out-of-court settlement. Another author later sued Haley for plagiarism but lost. A 1993 article in The Village Voice challenged the authenticity of certain aspects of Haley's story. Haley died of a heart attack in 1992 at age 70.
posted by haqspan at 7:33 AM on April 9, 2002

Hell, several of the apostle Paul's letters in the Christian New Testament are now thought to be pseudonymously written. So this isn't a new phenomenon, to say the least.
posted by ChrisTN at 11:48 AM on April 9, 2002

They left out the rudest example of the 20th century: the Pulitzer Prize winning 'Profiles in Courage' supposedly written by John F. Kennedy, but actually written by Jules Davids, Theodore Sorensen, and others.


Worse, yet, passages were lifted from a book by Winston Churchill. The following is from Richard Reeves' interview on C-Span's Booknotes:

Both of Kennedy's books were knockoffs of Winston Churchill books. There is a certain controversy: Did he write his own books? Well, he probably did, but they were written first by Winston Churchill, the same books, where Winston Churchill did a book on British political leadership at the turn of the century which was exactly the same as "Profiles in Courage." Some of the sentences were exactly the same.
posted by nobodyknowsimadog at 1:48 PM on April 9, 2002

Not to mention James Michener, whose crack team of underpaid grad students have written most of his books.
posted by acridrabbit at 3:12 PM on April 9, 2002

Sorry, you're right: FWDixon is a psuedonym.

However, the first dozen or so of the Hardy Boy series, which grounded them as best-sellers, were written by a single author: Leslie McFarlane, a Canuck.

Salon has a decent enough article about McFarlane.
posted by five fresh fish at 11:15 AM on April 11, 2002