Today is April Fool's Day, a fine time to take a look at literary pranks and hoaxes—books and authors that weren't exactly what they claimed to be.

We start with a novel that made it to the New York Times bestseller list, despite the fact that it didn't (yet) exist. Jean Shepherd was a popular radio personality in the 1950s, and he was annoyed by the fact that the bestseller list wasn't based only on actual sales, but also on bookstore reports of demand for a book. How could a book be a best seller if no one had actually sold a copy? So he began urging his listeners to place requests with their bookstores for a book that didn't exist: I, Libertine, a mildly bawdy ("banned in Boston," claimed Shepherd) historical novel by Frederick R. Ewing.

Shepherd's prank worked, and Ewing's imaginary novel became a bestseller based entirely on the requests of Shepherd's fans. The novel didn't stay imaginary for long, though. With Shepherd's cooperation, publisher Ian Ballantine hired novelist Theodore Sturgeon to write I, Libertine (e-book), which was published for real in 1956. Shepherd posed for the author photo of "Ewing."

A decade later, Mike McGrady would create another prank that turned into a bestseller, Naked Came the Stranger (e-book | print). McGrady was a columnist at the New York newspaper Newsday, and he thought that American popular culture had become too vulgar, that anything would sell with enough sex, no matter how poorly written it was. He recruited two dozen of his Newsday colleagues to write a chapter each of the trashiest novel they could imagine.

Naked Came the Stranger told the story of a woman who learned that her husband was cheating and set out to get revenge by sleeping with any man she could, each encounter making up a new chapter in the book. McGrady wanted to create a book with no literary value at all and forced several of his colleagues to re-write their chapters because they were too well written. The novel, published under the name Penelope Ashe, sold well, and sales only increased when the hoax was revealed.

George Plimpton was the perpetrator of our next hoax, which began with a Sports Illustrated article on April 1, 1985. The editor had asked Plimpton for an article on April Fools' hoaxes in sports; unable to find enough examples to fill an article, Plimpton chose to create his own hoax instead.

Plimpton's article was a profile of Sidd Finch, a young pitcher recently signed by the New York Mets. Finch, the reader was told, was an English orphan raised by Tibetan monks. He had pinpoint control and a 168 mph fastball (the actual record is about 100 mph) but wasn't really sure he wanted to be a baseball player. The Mets played along with the hoax, assigning Finch a locker and a uniform (he was number 21). The April 8 issue of Sports Illustrated announced that Finch had retired from baseball, deciding instead to pursue a career playing the French horn; the April 15 issue revealed the hoax. Plimpton expanded the article into a novel, The Curious Case of Sidd Finch (print), in 1987.

At this point, we cross the line from playful pranks to more troubling cases of fraud. These books can be covered more quickly, as many of them share a common theme: A writer claims experience with, or even to be part of, a minority group, talking about what they have learned from that group's tragic experience, perceived wisdom, and spirituality, or both.

Margaret Jones's Love and Consequences (print) is a "memoir" about life as a half-Native American foster child who was a gang member in South Los Angeles, written by a white woman raised by her biological parents in Sherman Oaks. In Mutant Message Down Under (e-book | print), Marlo Morgan tells the story, which she later admitted was entirely fictional, of her spiritual journey in an Australian Aboriginal community. Norma Khouri distances herself from the narrative of Honor Lost (print), her story of a Muslim friend who was killed by her family for falling in love with a Christian; the story was entirely made up.

The Education of Little Tree (print) was presented as an autobiography by Forrest Carter about the lessons he learned from his Cherokee grandparents; the author was actually Asa Carter, a Ku Klux Klan member who had run for governor in Alabama as a segregationist. James Frey's A Million Little Pieces (e-book | e-audio | print | audio) was a memoir of his supposed drug addiction. When the book was revealed to be a hoax, Frey's scolding was particularly public; he was raked over the coals by Oprah Winfrey, who had chosen the book for her book club.

Some fraudsters go so far as to claim to be telling the story of entirely fictional people. The Honored Society (print) claims to be the memoir of Michael Gambino, illegitimate grandson of Mafia boss Carlo Gambino; no such grandson exists. Under the name "Nasdijj," Tim Barruss published several "memoirs," beginning with The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams (print), in which he claimed to be a Navajo recovering from an abusive childhood by adopting special-needs children; none of those things were true.

Laura Albert wrote three books as "J. T. LeRoy;" the first was the novel Sarah (e-book | print). While the books were presented as fiction, they were described as semi-autobiographical stories about LeRoy's history of sexual abuse and drug use, and Albert's sister-in-law, Savannah Knoop, eventually became part of the hoax, making public appearances as LeRoy. Knoop writes about that experience in Girl Boy Girl (e-book).

Anthony Godby Johnson was the purported author of A Rock and a Hard Place (print), the memoir of a 16-year-old boy saved from an abusive family by adoption before contracting AIDS. There is no evidence that Anthony ever existed, and he appears to be the creation of the woman who claimed to be his adoptive mother. Among the people roped into the Johnson scam was novelist Armistead Maupin; his novel The Night Listener (print | audio) is loosely inspired by that experience.

To end on a slightly lighter note, Clifford Irving at least pretended to be someone who actually existed when he wrote The Autobiography of Howard Hughes (print). Hughes was a noted recluse, and Irving believed that Hughes would never draw attention to himself by taking legal action against a fake autobiography. Irving was wrong and served 17 months in prison for fraud. He later wrote The Hoax (e-book | e-audio | print | audio), telling the story of the fraud, or at least his version of it.

The stories of many of these authors are told in more detail in Bunk (e-book | e-audio | print | audio), Kevin Young's exploration of hoaxes and hucksters in American culture. Later this week, our "Music Memories" post will take a look at some of history's musical pranks and hoaxes.

Also This Week

April 3, 1783

Washington Irving was born. Irving was a writer in many genres, whose biographies of George Washington and Muhammad were much respected in his era. He also served as the United States ambassador to Spain in the early 1840s. Today, he is best remembered for his short stories (e-book | e-audio | print | audio), especially "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow."

April 7, 1795

France officially adopted the metric system, which is now the world's most commonly used system of measurement. According to the CIA World Factbook, only three countries have not at least begun conversion to the metric system: Myanmar, Liberia, and the United States. In Whatever Happened to the Metric System? (e-book | print), John Bemelmans Marciano looks back at the 1970s attempts to go metric in the United States, and why they failed.

April 3, 1922

Doris Day was born. Day began her career as a big-band singer in the 1940s, and became one of Hollywood's most popular actresses of the 1950s and 1960s, usually starring in musicals or romantic comedies. She made her last film in 1968 and turned to television. Day starred for five years in The Doris Day Show, a sitcom which went through major cast and premise changes almost every season.

April 1, 1942

Samuel R. Delany was born. Delany is an author of science fiction, memoirs, and literary criticism. Class, social mobility, and sexuality are among the recurring themes in his work, and many of his novels feature writers as characters. Delany won back-to-back Nebula Awards from the Science Fiction Writers of America for the year's best novels; Babel-17 (e-book | e-audio | print) was the winner for 1966, and The Einstein Intersection (e-book) for 1967.