Bibliograph

Can you ever forgive me?, memoirs of a literary forger, Lee Israel

Type

Label

Can you ever forgive me?, memoirs of a literary forger, Lee Israel

Language

eng

resource.biographical

autobiography

Index

no index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

Can you ever forgive me?

Oclc number

1023603465

Responsibility statement

Lee Israel

Sub title

memoirs of a literary forger

Summary

Before turning to her life of crime-running a one-woman forgery business out of a phone booth in a Greenwich Village bar and even dodging the FBI, Lee Israel had a legitimate career as an author of biographies. Her first book on Tallulah Bankhead was a New York Times bestseller, and her second, on the late journalist and reporter Dorothy Kilgallen, made a splash in the headlines. But by 1990, almost broke and desperate to hang onto her Upper West Side studio, Lee made a bold and irreversible career change: inspired by a letter she'd received once from Katharine Hepburn, and armed with her considerable skills as a researcher and celebrity biographer, she began to forge letters in the voices of literary greats. Between 1990 and 1991, she wrote more than three hundred letters in the voices of, among others, Dorothy Parker, Louise Brooks, Edna Ferber, Lillian Hellman, and Noel Coward-and sold the forgeries to memorabilia and autograph dealers

Table Of Contents

Brick and pigeons -- Wretched and excessive -- A Mayan minute -- The flies -- Slippery slope -- Cousin Sidney -- Louise -- Riffing -- Faux Louise -- Dorothy -- Noël -- The jig is up -- Violets for his furs -- Trimester two -- This ain't no country club, Lee -- Prep time -- My third trimester

Classification