Author unknown?

I've blogged tales of disputed authorship before, but this one is really interesting. According to an old, crotchety friend of the family, Ernest Hemingway was not the primary author of his well beloved works, his second wife was. According to this theory, she came on board in 1926 to revise The Sun Also Rises and did the bulk of the work through 1940, when The Old Man and the Sea was published. After that point, Hemingway did squat.

Hemingway was uneducated, and, as his "Selected Letters" showed all too painfully, only barely literate-only one edition of those letters was ever issued, in 1981, and was quickly pulled from the market, Kelley says, when Hemingway admirers realized how damagingly revealing the letters were- and the supple, dexterous prose of the stories and of the famous passages in "The Sun Also Rises" and "A Farewell to Arms" would have been not only beyond his artistic reach but beyond even his artistic hope.

I'd love to see some of those letters. Anyone have a copy?

I've always been intrigued by history that Ain't Really So. In fact, I think I chose the name Hobbsblog for this title as a subconscious homophonic nod to EJ Hobsbawm, who is an eminent theorist on invented traditions and history as it relates to nationalism. But I digress. Other cool examples of disputed authorship of words and items include:


The theory that Shakespeare (the doper) was actually Francis Bacon, although judging from this page, it looks pretty wacko. The claimant uses as his primary warrant cryptological embedded proofs he finds in various sonnets. I am skeptical.


Mikhail Bakhtin, master forger or channeler of other authors?


A big page of forgery related materials. The antique fakes stuff is really interesting.


Of course there's always the bible, but I'll just put up the link and duck.

It's worse than that, he's dead, Jim

I have been an admirer of the Leaving Oklahoma blog for a while, so imagine my surprise when I get invited to join it. Sure, why not, think I. So I wrote a bit there on my Sooner-ness. Feel free to check it out. I'll probably do an entry a week, and hope that the other posters don't get mad if I write long entries. I've always been a proponent of longer blog entries, especially if you do the personal blog style that I've fallen into.

From the "I can't believe anyone would sell this" file -- the Talking Tombstone. Yes, tired of only seeing epitaths? Why not have a recorded message from beyond the grave to welcome visitors. "Hi, I'm Nathan. Thanks for visiting. I sure could go for a beer about now. I recommend the Blackstrap Stout at the pub about 500 feet behind you. Go check it out after laying your flowers."

This bit in the Atlantic about the making of a good obituary is interesting. I especially like that the extra-big celebrities make some of the worst obits.

I leave you with this: Samson may be history's first recorded sociopath. Think about it.

Hobbsblog II owes the following blogs for links: Backup Brain and Arts and Literature daily