Conformity Killed the Radio Star: Jean Shepherd and the Great Literary Hoax of I, LIBERTINE
As Long As It Isn’t True: A Literary Scandals PodcastShow Notes
"The people who believe in these lists are asleep. Anyone sitting up at three in the morning secretly has doubts."
Are you a day person or a night person? Ask Jean Shepherd, the infamous late-night '50s radio DJ who concocted an entire literary hoax in the form of a book called I, Libertine. Shepherd believed that Manhattan, and the world at large, depended almost entirely upon lists — like The New York Times Best Seller list. So, he asked his listeners to help him come up with the name of a title of a book that didn't exist, so that they all might visit bookstores the next day and ask for it and watch the confusion grow on the employees' faces. The ruse even started to reach cities overseas like Paris and Rome. It was the greatest book to never exist, until it suddenly did exist...
Theme music is credited to Wendy Marcini, Elvin Vanguard, and Jules Gaia.
Instagram: @literaryscandals
Selected bibliography: • Excelsior, You Fathead!: The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd by Eugene B. Bergmann • “The Man Behind the Brilliant Media Hoax of ‘I, Libertine,’” The Awl • “An interview with Shepherd on the hoax from Long John Nebel’s radio show,” WFMU’s Beware of the Blog • “Ballantine Books Makes Hoax Come True,” The Wall Street Journal
More from As Long As It Isn’t True: A Literary Scandals Podcast
After a long hiatus, As Long As It Isn't True returns for season two. In 1958, Truman Capote published his novella Breakfast at Tiffany's, which would go on to become one of the most beloved pieces of literature of all-time. It would inspire the equally beloved film adaptation starring Audrey Hepburn in 1961, a film we're still talking about today. But Capote's inspiration for the character of Holly Golightly is a whole other story, as well as the flocks of women who started claiming they were the real Holly Golightly on which Capote based the character. Threats of libel lawsuits were made. But the true inspiration for Holly is something of a Freudian tale... Instagram: @literaryscandals Selected bibliography: • Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman by Sam Wasson • "Gay Pride Book: Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's - the Novel That Saved My Life" by Jamie Brickhouse, HuffPost • Capote by Gerald Clarke
After her writing career as a biographer was destroyed by a book that tanked, as well as her off-putting personality, Lee Israel fell into poverty and began forging letters and literary documents of prominent 20th-century authors. She was so good at slipping into the words and minds of others that some of her forgeries even made their way into an early edition of a 2007 biography on Noël Coward. But like all good career criminals, Lee's success would come to an untimely end. She would tell her story in her 2008 memoir Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Memoirs of a Literary Forger, which was adapted into a feature film starring Melissa McCarthy as Lee — for which she would be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress.
“You can’t translate poetry into prose. That’s why it’s poetry.”
“Rapidly growing interest in the subject of homosexuality has made novels on this theme a big seller...”
"It is most damnable! It is written by a man with a diseased mind and a soul so black that he would obscure even the darkness of hell!"