Saturday, April 15, 2006
The Guardian

(Read original article here)
…The ultra-hip San Francisco literary festival, Litquake, is not until September, but details of the first fundraiser - on the voguish theme of the literary hoax - have been announced. Examination is promised of the JT Leroy hoax in which the “big-sunglasses-wearing-boy-hooker-with- a-past” literary meteor turned out to be a 40-year-old woman, and The Education of Little Tree, acclaimed as a Native American memoir until it was reclassified as fiction when the author was exposed as a former white supremacist who had written Governor George Wallace’s “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” speech. The Hitler diaries and the Howard Hughes autobiography are also set for scrutiny as well as non-literary hoaxes, including Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds broadcast and “informed conjecture about whether we ever really did put that man on the moon”.

NW