It certainly isn’t uncommon for a novelist to pattern his fictional characters after people in real life, often from among his or her very own acquaintances. Not surprisingly, the publication of a novel is very likely followed by bruised egos and frayed friendships. It may even give rise to bitter recriminations and lawsuits, or—even worse—to threats of physical harm or even death to the offending author.
In “The Deadliest Book Review,” an essay he wrote for the January 14, 2011
The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Peter Duffy recalls what is perhaps the most spectacular crime in American literary history: David Graham Phillips, author of the novel
The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig, was gunned down 100 years ago by Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough, who believed that Philips had libeled the Goldsborough family in the novel. At the time, Phillips had just been christened by the flamboyant journalist H. L. Mencken as “the leading American novelist,” the star of the first decade of the 20th century. His assailant, on the other hand, hailed from the gilded aristocracy that Phillips had regarded as so destructive to America.
Turn-of-the-century novelist David Graham Phillips was gunned down by Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough who believed that Philips had libeled the Goldsborough family in this muckraking fictional novel
But had Phillips really libeled the Goldsboroughs? According to Duffy’s account of the murder, Phillips’s friends and family insisted that he had never heard of the Goldsboroughs, and that Phillips himself—“as if speaking for every novelist who has ever been accused of callous indifference to the reputations of real people”—said as he lay dying that he actually didn’t know the man who had gunned him down.
Read Peter Duffy’s “The Deadliest Book Review” in The New York Times Sunday Book Review now!Read the full text of David Graham Phillips’ The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig in the archive format now! ANOTHER INTERESTING READING:In “The Trouble With Autobiography,” an essay he wrote for the January 2011 issue of the
Smithsonian Magazine, bestselling novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux examines other authors’ autobiographies to justify why he won’t attempt to write his own autobiography. Instead, he says, he might write an autobiographical novel. He explains: “I think I would find it impossible to write an autobiography without invoking the traits I seem to deplore in the ones I’ve described—exaggeration, embroidery, reticence, invention, heroics, mythomania, compulsive revisionism, and all the rest that are so valuable to fiction. Therefore, I suppose my Copperfield beckons.”
Read Paul Theroux’s “The Trouble With Autobiography” in the Smithsonian Magazine now!
