As the Wilkes Expedition, organized by the U.S. Navy, prepared to depart for South America and Antarctica during the late 1830s, polar travel received a great deal of attention in America. This was the context in which a serialized tale authored by Edgar Allan Poe appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger in January and February, 1837. Titled "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym," it presented the story of an explorer, Arthur Gordon Pym, who traveled to the polar latitudes where he suffered a mysterious demise.

The tale first appeared "under the garb of fiction," but when Poe republished it a year later as a novel, he added a preface claiming the work was factual. However, the story is so bizarre that it is certain most readers realized they were being presented with fiction.

The story was a dramatization of the beliefs of John Cleves Symmes, a man who promoted the theory that the earth was hollow and inhabited within. Symmes had long sought funding for a polar expedition (led by himself) so that he could prove his theory. Poe's fictional explorer, Pym, was on a similar quest.

Extracts from the Journal of a "Julius Rodman" appeared in a series of six installments in Burton's Gentlemen's Magazine between January and June 1840. The journal purported to detail a 1792 expedition led by Julius Rodman up the Missouri River toward the Far North. This 1792 expedition, if true, would have made Rodman the first European to cross the Rocky Mountains.

Julius Rodman's expedition was subsequently noted by a member of the U.S. Senate, Robert Greenhow, who wrote in a Senate document, "It is proper to notice here an account of an expedition across the American continent, made between 1791 and 1794, by a party of citizens of the United States, under the direction of Julius Rodman, whose journal has been recently discovered in Virginia, and is now in course of publication in a periodical magazine at Philadelphia."

Rodman was actually a fictitious character invented by Edgar Allan Poe. To create this ruse Poe penned the entire journal, relying heavily on sources such as Washington Irving's Astoria and Lewis and Clark's History of the Expedition to give his account a veneer of authenticity. Poe's motive for perpetrating this elaborate hoax is unclear.

Jean Nepomucene Auguste Pichauld, Comte de Fortsas, was a man with a singular passion. He collected books of which only one copy was known to exist. If he ever discovered that one of the volumes in his library had a duplicate anywhere in the world, he would immediately dispose of it. So when he died on September 1, 1839 he possessed only fifty-two books, but each of them was absolutely unique.

His heir, not sharing the old man's passion for book collecting, arranged for an auction to sell off the library, and so a catalog of this small but highly unusual collection was mailed to bibliophiles throughout Europe. The auction, the collectors were told, was to be held in the offices of Mâitre Mourlon, notary, 9 rue de l'Église, in Binche, Belgium on August 10, 1840. More→

The December 1845 edition of the American Whig Review contained an account of an unusual experiment designed to test whether hypnotism could delay the arrival of death. According to the article, a terminally ill patient, M. Ernest Valdemar, who only had hours left to live, was placed in a trance by a hypnotist. The effect was quite remarkable. Valdemar appeared to go into a state of suspended animation, moving only in response to the hypnotist's commands. He remained in this state for over a day, much to the surprise of his doctors who hadn't given him that long to live. Then Valdemar's pulse stopped and his breathing ceased. He was dead, but his brain remained alive, bound to the will of the hypnotist. Valdemar could gurgle out brief responses to questions.

For seven months Valdemar remained in this condition, halfway between death and life, until finally the doctors agreed the trial had gone on long enough. The hypnotist gave the command for the patient to wake from the trance. As he did so the man's body immediately collapsed inwards, disintegrating into a puddle of "detestable putridity."

The account of this experiment was widely reprinted both in America and in Europe. A prominent Boston hypnotist, Robert Collyer, declared that he had no doubt of the truth of the case, since he himself had once brought a man back to life who had died from overdrinking.

However, the article was actually a piece of fiction written by Edgar Allan Poe. When a Scottish correspondent wrote to Poe inquiring about the veracity of the experiment, Poe replied bluntly, "Hoax is precisely the word suited to M. Valdemar's case."

The April 14, 1849 edition of The Flag of Our Union contained an article titled "Von Kempelen and his Discovery." It described the discovery by a German chemist, Baron Von Kempelen, of an alchemical process to transform lead into gold. The account concluded by noting that news of the discovery had already caused a two hundred per cent leap in the price of lead in Europe.

The story was fictional, although this was not indicated anywhere. Its author was Edgar Allan Poe. He had evidently hoped that the tale might deter some of the "forty-niners" who were heading off to California in search of gold that had recently been discovered there.

Poe wrote to Evert A. Duyckinck, "My sincere opinion is that nine persons out of ten (even among the best informed) will believe the quiz (provided the design does not leak out before publication) and that thus, acting as a sudden, although of course a very temporary, check to the gold-fever, it will create a stir to some purpose."

Despite Poe's confidence in his creation, there is no evidence many people were taken in by this hoax.

Under the heading "Posthumous Poetry," Indiana's Kokomo Dispatch published a poem titled "Leonainie" on August 3, 1877. It was an unremarkable poem except in one way. The editor of the Dispatch, John Henderson, claimed it was a previously unpublished poem by Edgar Allan Poe. (Click here to read the poem.)

The publication of this poem generated excitement among fans and scholars of Poe, and within a few weeks it had been reprinted in major papers throughout the United States. But in reality it was not a poem by Poe. Its true author was a struggling young Indiana poet, James Whitcomb Riley. More→

In 1887 a "disappointed literary aspirant," hoping to illustrate the ignorance of publishers and the diffulties faced by unknown authors, copied out the text of Milton's drama "Samson Agonistes," retitled it "Like a Giant Refreshed," and sent it as an original work of his own to publishers and editors. None recognized the work. One rejected it because it was too like a sensational novel. Another said it was "disfigured by Scotticisms." A third offered to publish it, but only if the author contributed thirty pounds toward the expenses.

The literary aspirant (whose name is not known) published the results of his experiment in a letter sent to the St. James's Gazette.

In 1916 a slender volume of poetry titled Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments introduced the Spectric school of poetry to the world. It joined many other experimental schools of poetry then currently in vogue, such as the Imagists, the Futurists, and the Idealists.

The Spectric poems were rather bizarre and nonsensical, but were also fun, full of life, and decked out with colorful (albeit illogical) imagery. More→

Joan Lowell claimed she grew up on her father's schooner, traveling the South Seas. She described her maritime adventures in The Cradle of the Deep, published in 1929. But in reality she grew up in Berkeley, California and had spent only a few months at sea. More→

Max Harris was a glamorous young Australian poet who was making a reputation for himself as something of a rebel as editor of Angry Penguins, a cutting-edge literary magazine. Harris wanted to shake up the artistic community by exposing it to new ideas and new writers, and in 1944 he thought he had found a writer worth taking under his wing. That writer's name was Ern Malley. More→

On September 20, 1956 Ballantine Books published I, Libertine, a novel by Frederick R. Ewing. It was advertised as a "turbulent, turgid, tempestuous" tale of eighteenth-century court life in London. However, Ewing didn't actually exist. Both he and the book were the creation of nighttime deejay Jean Shepherd, devised as an elaborate hoax upon "day people." More→

In 1967 the war in Vietnam was escalating and race riots were breaking out in many major U.S. cities. Popular distrust of the federal government was growing. It was in this context that on October 16 a book appeared titled Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace. It was published by Dial Press, a division of Simon & Schuster.

Leonard C. Lewin, a New York freelance writer, wrote the introduction to the book. He explained that the report had been compiled by 15 experts known as the Special Study Group (SSG) who had been brought together by the U.S. government. The SSG had first met in 1963 at a secret "underground nuclear hideout" called Iron Mountain. They had then held periodic meetings during the next two and a half years to discuss the problems that would confront the United States if it entered into a period of permanent peace. According to Lewin, one of the experts ("John Doe") who was identified as a professor of social science at a 'large Middle Western University,' had decided to release the report to the public.

The report, in language full of think-tank jargon, documented the conclusions of the Special Study Group concerning whether peace was possible, given the economic condition of the world. The SSG decided that peace "would almost certainly not be in the best interest of stable society." War, they argued, was simply too important a part of the world economy, and therefore it was necessary to continue a state of war indefinitely... More→

In 1968 Carlos Castaneda, a graduate student in anthropology at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), published The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. It described his encounters with Don Juan Matus, a Yaqui shaman from Mexico. Don Juan supposedly trained Castaneda in ancient forms of knowledge, such as how to use drugs to communicate with animals (or even to become an animal). Castaneda's book became a bestseller and was an important influence on the New Age movement. Castaneda was awarded a doctorate by UCLA in 1972.

Castaneda insisted Don Juan was a real person, but this is widely doubted by scholars. Skeptics point to the fact that Castaneda never describes Don Juan speaking in his native language, nor does Don Juan use local names to describe any plants or animals. Castaneda never showed his field notes to anyone. And many of the experiences Castaneda describes, such as hiking for days through the Sonoran desert in the middle of the summer, border on the impossible.

Castaneda also falsified details of his own biography. Castaneda claimed he was born in Brazil in 1935, but an investigation by Time magazine revealed he was actually born in Peru in 1925.

Newsday columnist Mike McGrady was convinced that standards of literary and artistic taste were plummeting rapidly in the United States, driven down by a relentless flood of media sensationalism that catered to the lowest common denominator. So he decided to design an experiment to test the depths of the American cultural morass. He would commission the writing of a novel lacking in any redeeming features: no plot or character development, no social insight, and definitely no verbal skill. It would possess only one feature that could possibly hold a reader's attention: lots of kinky sex scenes. In fact, it would have a minimum of two sex scenes per chapter. If the book was a success, McGrady reasoned, it would prove that the American public completely lacked all standards of taste. More→

Throughout history there have numerous cases of forgers faking diaries and biographies of people who are already dead. But, for obvious reasons, it is far less common for a forger to fake the biography of a person who is still alive. But this is exactly what happened when writer Clifford Irving forged the "autobiography" of the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, while Hughes was still alive. In 1971 Irving told his publisher, McGraw-Hill, that Hughes had contacted him after reading and enjoying one of his earlier books. Hughes, he said, wanted to write an autobiography in order to set straight all the lies and rumors that were circulating about his life, and he wanted Irving to ghostwrite the work. Irving produced letters from Hughes (all forged) to prove the offer was real. McGraw-Hill completely fell for Irving’s story. They eventually gave him almost $1,000,000 in order to secure the rights to the work, and in return Irving handed them Hughes’s “autobiography” a few months later. More→