Ghostwriters are authors who write works that are credited to someone else. The work itself could be a novel, song, or movie. This week, I'm gonna take a look at some interesting cases of alleged ghostwriters you may not know about. Keep in mind that the point of being a ghostwriter is to not be known, so a lot of ghostwriting cases can be made up of rumors.
James Bond
Ian Flemming's famous series was most likely written by himself. The one book people suspect may have been ghostwritten is The man in the Golden Gun. It had been published after his death. Apparently, Flemming had written all the novel but wasn't entirely happy with it. After his death, the publisher sent the book to Kingsley Amis to look over. The publisher says that Amis did not add anything to the book. Of course, rumors spread about how Amis did make changes, perhaps adding to the book or entirely rewriting it. Like most ghostwriting cases, we don't know the truth.
Tom Clancy
It wouldn't really be surprising that Tom Clancy didn't write all of his books. I don't even know if I can call it ghostwriting. At this point, there have been so many rumors that some people just assume that Tom Clancy had ghostwriters in some form. Tom Clancy's books have continued to be made since his death, but that isn't as much of a ghostwriting case since it's kinda obvious Clancy didn't write these. Clancy is seen as a producer-like figure, being in charge of all of these books, but not necessarily writing all of them. A good number of writers have alleged that they were hired to ghostwrite for him.
So many famous people's books
Almost every famous person has their own book. Sometimes the ghostwriter themself is famous, as is with the case of HP Lovecraft writing a story for Harry Houdini (Imprisoned with the Pharaohs). It doesn't matter what field you're in, you can have your own tell-all. Obviously, not every famous person can write their own book. It would make sense then, that they have more skilled authors that help them write it. Because of how common it is with famous non-writers making books with the help of others, it has become more common to credit the people who help. You can look for yourself if a book has a small section of the cover reading "with the help of ____".
These are just some examples of ghostwriting cases. Almost every famous author or songwriter has been accused of using ghostwriters at some point in their career. Feel free to share any of those cases you find interesting in the comments. To send you off I'd like to remind you that everything I told you in this post might be fake and totally untrue, either that or every writer you love might be a fraud. :)
-Coleman Clougherty
This is a pretty interesting concept, almost like the opposite of a pseudonym. Nice, concise cases, really interesting overall.
ReplyDeleteI guess ghost writers are kind of like pen names but with an actual person instead of a fake name. I've heard Dumas who's the guy who wrote the three musketeers wrote so much that eventually he hired a lot of people to write in his name, but I don't know if that was known while he was alive.
ReplyDeleteI've actually never heard of ghostwriters so I thought that this post was super cool! I thought that the ghostwriting case with the James Bond series was really interesting, because no one will ever know if Amis changed nothing, a little, or a lot of the book and there's not really any way to find out. I was surprised that there were actually a lot of ghostwriting cases, because I didn't think that it would be that common. Great post!
ReplyDeleteCool post! I was completely unaware that ghost writers were a thing, so I'm a little horrified. I feel like if celebrities want to write a book but can't write, they should just write it anyway. In the case of celebrity authors like Gabbie Hanna and Kylie and Kendall Jenner, they just went ahead and published books even though they were terrible. I feel very sorry for ghost writers, and bad authors should just not publish or publish their own bad work.
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting topic that I didn't know a lot about before. Not directly related, but something I heard about at a talk once was how the Nancy Drew series, written by "Carolyn Keene," was actually several people throughout the history of the books that wrote under that pseudonym.
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