This Best-Selling Novel Was A Total Hoax!

[david_is_achu]

This man single handedly trolled the entirety of New York State in the 50s. He’s a national hero

[Robin]

This is 100% how I feel about half of the popular Netflix Shows where I hear how amazing they are and I feel like I've never heard of it before

[powellmountainmike]

I knew about I Libertine. I was a big Shep fan. As a kid I listened to his radio broadcast every weeknight, and to the Saturday night shows from the Limelight Club in Greenwich Village when he did those. I also read all his books. He was a brilliant writer of humorous short stories, compilations of the stories he told on the radio each night. He also wrote several screen plays which were made into movies. The most famous of these is A Christmas Story, about the kid with the Red Rider BB gun. That movie is a compilation of stories he had told over the years on his radio show. He also had a TV show on PBS called Jean Shepherd's America. He was probably the greatest humorist of his age, not comedian, HUMORIST, in the tradition of Samuel Clemens. We have not seen his like nor equal since.

[kennyhogg]

I found out some best sellers and classics are just a product of commercializing them. You get the right people to promote your book and it rises to the top. Some of them just started out as dime store paperbacks, and now are taught in classes, while other just as good novels fade into history.

[TJ-buzk]

When people say "thats just a conspiracy theory! Do you how many people need to be in on it for it to be true?" Only a very small number... the rest just need to be complicit in perpetuating it.

[Fragolux]

I sort of did this in high school psychology. Part of my finals was to write an essay, so on the spot I threw together a bunch of gobbledygook packed with buzzwords and vague references to Buddhism and the Bhagavad Gita and hoped for the best. My teacher gave my an A and wrote that I was "well thought."

[paulkim]

Such an interesting phenomenon. It's like that YouTube channel that created a five-star restaurant that doesn't exist

Edit: It was actually a Vice journalist.

[WoolfJ]

New York hasn't even changed hell the rest of the Country became this smh

[remyblas]

I can't even remember major details about books I have read more than once and these people can have discussions and write reviews about a fake work they didn't even read.

[idk-xsnz]

Oh, so this is what the hit film Goncharov was inspired by! I noticed some really cool references in the film.

[kittycatcitycat]

PLEASE tell me someone wrote a good analysis book about this! A simple prank shows how easy it is for the academic and literary world to become nothing but an echo chamber. The painful thing is, not every person who perpetuated this myth by far was a complete phony, I'm sure. Academia can be tiring, so a lot of people will add a reference to something based on what they've read is in it, trusting the reviewer. Amazing that the first person to get to the bottom of things was a lone reporter. What would this story sound like from his perspective? How was he thinking against the grain and how did he manage to get someone to finally let him in on the radio show, unraveling the whole thing? What did some of the more terrible fakes say, when the book they were building nonsense around went up in smoke?

[freya]

This video is really amazing! It’s probably my favourite of yours and one of the best videos I’ve ever seen and I can’t stop myself from coming back to it all the time.

[robertmitchell]

when 'the world according to garp' hit the paperback stands, it was presented in an elaborate cardboard display featuring four different colored covers. i asked a friend if it was any good. he said that it was so good, he read all four of them.

[MyFoxworld]

I remember reading that book before it was written. I actually read it about a year before it was even mentioned on the radio. 👀

[notcaptain]

The people pretending to have read it to keep up appearances are definitely at fault here, but some of the other instances where, for instance, libraries create a file for the author, I wouldn't be quick to judge. Remember this is long before the internet. You can't just quickly google this. If a bunch of people are talking about a book you don't recognize, the most reasonable assumption isn’t "mass prank by a shock jock, " it's "I guess I don’t have this particular book. Should probably try to rectify that."

[heyitsevan]

About half way through the video, part of me wondered if Austin was going to end the video by saying, “None of this actually happened, and you just fell victim to the exact same thing I was describing in the story.”

[trevormillar]

Something similar happened on Britain in the 1990s about a book called "Fly Fishing" by J.R Hartley; it was a publicity stunt by thr publishers of the Yellow Pages.

[CasualHistorian]

Bravo. This is the kind of video I love to see from this channel.

[JDoors]

I love Jean Sheperd. He wrote some hilarious books, one of which was made into "A Christmas Story, " which he narrated.

[trevormillar]

In the 60s someone hyped a nonexistent record called "Heavy Jelly".