The Poet and the Murderer A True Story of Literary Crime and the Art of Forgery

by Worrall, Simon

• ISBN13: 9780525945963
• ISBN10: 0525945962
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-04-01
• Publisher: E P Dutton

Summary

In The Poet and the Murderer, acclaimed journalist Simon Worrall takes readers into the haunting mind of Mark Hofmann, one of the most daring literary forgers and remorseless murderers of the late twentieth century.He was a young Mormon boy who loathed what he believed to be the hypocrisy of his faith, and who devised secret ways to infiltrate and undermine the church. Mark Hofmann began his career by forging and selling rare Mormon coins, and quickly moved on to creating false, highly controversial religious documents that threw the Church of Latter-Day Saints into turmoil. But it was his infamous Emily Dickinson poem that would prove his greatest deception, stunning the art and literary worlds and earning him thousands from the most distinguished Dickinson scholars. It would also prove his ultimate undoing, when his desperation to keep his greatest forgery a secret drove him to commit ever more heinous crimes-including acts of shocking violence.Filled with the page-turning suspense and tantalizing sleuthing techniques of a literary thriller, The Poet and the Murderergives us an unforgettable portrait of a deeply irreligious man and a brilliant con artist whose greatest talent-and greatest tragedy--was his ability to conceal his mad genius behind the unique gifts and enduring celebrity of others.

Author Biography

Simon Worrall has published articles in the Sunday Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and National Geographic magazine, among others. The Poet and the Murderer is his first book.

Excerpts

IntroductionIt was a cold, crisp fall day as I walked up the driveway of the Emily Dickinson Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts. A row of hemlock trees along the front of the house cast deep shadows on the brickwork. A squirrel scampered across the lawn with an acorn between its teeth. Entering by the back door, I walked along a dark hallway hung with family portraits, then climbed the stairs to the second-floor bedroom.The word Homestead is misleading. With its elegant cupola, French doors, and Italian facade, this Federal-style mansion on Main Street, which the poet's grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, built in 1813, is anything but a log cabin. Set back from the road, with a grove of oaks and maples screening it to the rear, and a large, concealed garden, it was, and is, one of the finest houses in Amherst.The bedroom was a large, square, light-filled room on the southwest corner. One window looked down onto Main Street. From the other window I could see the Evergreens, where Emily Dickinson's brother, Austin, and her sister-in-law, Sue Gilbert Dickinson, had lived. Halfway along the east wall was the sleigh bed where the poet had slept, always alone, for almost her entire life. She was less than five and a half feet tall, and the bed was as small as a child's. I prodded the mattress. It felt hard and unyielding. In front of the window looking across to the Evergreens was a small writing table. It was here that Dickinson wrote almost all of her poetry, and the nearly one thousand letters that have come down to us. Poems came to this high-spirited, fiercely independent redhead in bursts of language, like machine-gun fire. She scribbled down drafts of poems, mostly in pencil, on anything she had to hand as she went about her daily chores: the backs of envelopes, scraps of kitchen or wrapping paper. Once she used the back of a yellow chocolate-box wrapper from Paris. She wrote a poem on the back of an invitation to a candy pulling she had received a quarter of a century earlier. The pain-staking work of revision and editing was done mostly at night at this table. Working by the light of an oil lamp, she copied, revised, and edited, often over a period of several years, the half-formed thoughts and feelings she had jotted down while baking gingerbread, walking her invalid mother in the garden, or tending the plants in the conservatory her father had built for her, and that was her favorite place in the Homestead.I stood by the table imagining her working there, with her back to me, her thick hair piled on top of her head, the lines of her body visible under her white cotton dress. Then I hurried back down the stairs, crossed the parking lot to where I had left my car, and drove the three quarters of a mile to the Jones Library on Amity Street. There was a slew of messages on my cell phone. One was from a gun dealer in Salt Lake City. Another was from the head of public relations at Sotheby's in New York. A third was from an Emily Dickinson scholar at Yale University named Ralph Franklin. I did not know it at the time, but these calls were strands in a web of intrigue and mystery that I would spend the next three years trying to untangle. It had all begun when I came across an article in The New York Times, in April 1997, announcing that an unpublished Emily Dickinson poem, the first to be discovered in forty years, was to be auctioned at Sotheby's. I did not know much about Dickinson at the time, except that she had lived an extremely reclusive life and that she had published almost nothing during her lifetime. The idea that a new work by a great artist, whether it is Emily Dickinson or Vincent van Gogh, could drop out of the sky like this, appealed to my sense of serendipity. Who knows, I remember thinking, maybe one day they will find the original manuscript of Hamlet.I thought nothing more about the matter until four months later, at the end of August, when I came acro