A "literary scandals" collection?

- T.E. Lawrence's "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom"
Not sure about this one; because the author didn't approve of it?

No, because he seems to have made rather a lot of it up. The scandal
was provoked by Richard Aldington's biography, though there had been
an earlier book (with "Arab Revolt" in the title, I forget the author)
which had deflated Lawrence's self-publicity in the mid-1930s.

Probably the bit that got people's attention was Aldington's claim
that the incident in which Lawrence was buggered by border guards
was pure sexual fantasy.

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In article ,
Jon Meyers wrote:
Dave wrote:
On Thu, 04 May 2006 22:13:30 -0500, Jon Meyers
wrote:

Helium wrote:
Jon Meyers wrote:
The recent stories about Kaavya Viswanathan's partially plagiarized
.... got me to wondering about the possibilities for a collection
based on books that erupted into literary scandals over plagiarism
and/or authenticity.

What else would you include?

What about books that offended the moral and religious sensibilities
of established elites e.g. books by Darwin, Copernicus, etc. as well
as novels banned by the church e.g. Joyce's Ulysses, Cleland's Fannie
Hill, etc. (the lists are endless), and so on. There seems to be many
criteria for creating an interesting collection of books that caused
scandals. regards, He2

I thought about those types of books, too, but I was really thinking
specifically about controversies of authorship or authority (plagiarism,
falsification, misrepresentation) rather than books whose content
offended on grounds of morality, religion, etc.


What about historical revisionists- David Irving and the Holocaust for
example? Would you include that as an example of literary scandal?

I realize this could easily devolve into Flat Earth, Lemurian
kookery, but kept at the upper levels of (what passes as) scholarly
research and away from Art Bell-ian mouth-breather hysteria
would you include this?.


I think I wouldn't include these books, because, although they may elide
or misrepresent the known facts, and may be the work of total wackjobs,
they are, mostly, the work of *sincere* wackjobs. These writers really
believe their own nonsense, so there is, in their minds at least, no
intent to deceive, no manufacture of fraudulent material being passed
off as genuine. So, unless they stole their nutty idea, and the
particular expression of it, from some other nut and presented it as
their own, these authors, and their books, don't fit the category.


--Jon Meyers

Carlos Castenada's Don Juan series "The Teachings of Don Juan", etc.

Matthew Hill