Literary Milli Vanillis

With the recent spate of highly publicized, falsified memoirs (Love and Consequences, Million Little Pieces), it's easy to think this is a recent phenomenon. It turns out that literary fakers have existed for a long, long time. For example, a slave narrative published in 1863 was revealed to be a novel written by a white historian, Richard Hildreth. The New York Times describes other examples here.