THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW YOU NEEDED TO KNOW

What image springs to mind when you hear the word author? (For me it's Grande Dame des Lettres Canadienne Margaret Atwood.) But would you picture a pre-teen from 1927? You should, given that Barbara Newhall Follett published two novels in her early teens. But Barbara Newhall Follett it is known more as a famous missing person, vanishing December 7 1939, never to be seen again. Barbara Newhall Follett was born in Hanover, New Hampshire on March 3, 1914. Her parents were Helen and Wilson Follett, both writers and literary critics. Wilson Follett taught English at Dartmouth, Brown, and Yale before accepting a job at Knopf Publishing in New York City. Helen educated Barbara at home and encouraged a love of all things literary. Barbara began typing letters to friends and family and even set up her own office, all by the age of four. She counted Beethoven, Strauss, and Wagner as her imaginary friends. By age 6 she'd written a 4,500 word story - The Life of the Spinning Wheel, the Roc...

In 1969 British journalist David Frost introduced his guest - Penelope Ashe - author of a recent best-selling novel. The novel, Naked Came the Stranger , was an erotic literary smash. Surely a comely young sexy-librarian type wrote the book, and would soon take the stage all intellectual in a mini dress and Go-Go boots, glasses askew just so. When Frost announced Miss Ashe the author came out, and came out, and came out, until the stage was filled with 23 men and two women.  Naked Came the Stranger  was a literary hoax. Mike McGrady, a journalist for Newsday magazine, decided to pull a prank on the publishing industry. He felt that books at that time were all sizzle and smut. Jacqueline Susann was publishing's it girl after the success of Valley of the Dolls - a pill popping, booze soaked showbiz pot boiler. McGrady thought that if "trash" like Valley of the Dolls  could earn best seller status, then he could do the same. He asked a team of 25 writers - mostly men - to ...

Three of the twentieth centuries biggest wits - Noel Coward, Fanny Brice, and Dorothy Parker - all recieved a career boost years after their deaths from an unlikely source, forger Lee Israel. Not exactly a master criminal, Israel forged letters from literary and entertainment legends. Her operation was fairly low-key. She wasn't caught in some grand sting that culminated in a shootout. She was simply approached by FBI agents and agreed to be questioned. Lee Israel's greatest lie wasn't the letters she made up, but the story she told about her forgery operation in her 2008 memoir Can You Ever Forgive Me? (upon which the 2018 film is based.) Contradictions abound, but, as a writer, Lee Israel knew how to tell a good story. Leonore Carol Israel was born December 3, 1939 in Brooklyn to a Jewish family, with whom she wasn't close. She graduated CUNY Brooklyn in 1961. For most of the 1960s she was a freelance writer, writing for Soap Opera Digest and The New York Times . I...