THE POET AND THE MURDERER

Journalist Worrall’s dynamic debut profiles master forger Mark Hofmann, who fabricated an unpublished Emily Dickinson poem and gulled the highest reaches of the Mormon church.

Hofmann's gift for handwriting mimicry—coupled with his powers of concentration—allowed the unassuming Salt Lake City man to produce extraordinarily convincing literary fakes, many of which surfaced in the early 1980s. Tracing Hofmann's career, Worrall begins with one of his most startling feats, the creation of a Dickinson poem from whole cloth. Though the book’s title puts the poet on equal footing with Hofmann (who eventually murdered two people in an attempt to put off creditors), it is really the forger's story. Hofmann began his fakery in high school, when he counterfeited a coin; from there, a combination of cynicism, creativity, and greed led him to “discover” a series of ever more fantastic historical documents perfectly pitched to appeal to the Mormon hierarchy. All seem to have been created in an effort to make church founders look ridiculous; the most well-known is the “salamander letter,” which has Joseph Smith receiving wisdom from an angry, talking amphibian. Although this ground has been traveled before in at least one lengthy work dedicated only to the Mormon forgeries (The Mormon Murders, by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith), Worrall expands the scope, including a detailed portrait of Dickinson's life and work, the history of forgery, and examinations of Hofmann's other fakes, including a phony version of “Oath of a Freeman,” the first document printed in colonial America. The author also digs deep into Sotheby's auction house, vendor of the false Dickinson, reporting on lawmen and authorities in the scholarly community who complain that their warnings of forgeries to Sotheby's regularly go unheeded.

Gripping.