Garrison Keillor: Confessions of a Plagiarist
[Garrison Keillor is the host of "A Prairie Home Companion" and writes a syndicated column.]
...It’s resentment, I think, that lights a fire of ambition in our tails and drives us to beat our wings on the porch screen, hoping to reach the incandescent glow of fame and fortune.
And now I wonder what deep-down resentment the late Stephen Ambrose was nursing that motivated him to lie about his closeness to his biographee Dwight D. Eisenhower and claim to have spent hundreds of hours with Ike when, in fact, according to a close examination of the General’s daily diary, Mr. Ambrose probably spent no more than four or five.
When the story came out in The New Yorker last week, I felt ill. I admired the man. I loved “Citizen Soldiers,” about the Battle of the Bulge. He was a deservedly best-selling historian (“D-Day,” “Band of Brothers”), the prolific author of books on Lewis and Clark, George A. Custer, the transcontinental railroad, the Civil War, biographer of Eisenhower and Nixon: Why did the gentleman need to stoop to such a pitiful petty lie? And why did he lift passages from other writers and use them without quotation marks? Did someone make fun of his lack of erudition, growing up in Whitewater, Wisconsin? Did he feel inferior to his doctor dad? A longtime smoker (who died of lung cancer in 2002), maybe Mr. Ambrose was given to tempting fate and playing with fire.
Plagiarism is suicide. It stems from envy, I suppose, or in Ambrose’s case, the rush to produce books in rapid succession, but no matter, it’s a stain that peroxide won’t lift out. All your hard work over a lifetime, blighted by the word “plagiarism” every time somebody writes about you. It’s in the third or fourth graph of your obituary, a splotch on your escutcheon....
Read entire article at I.H.T.
...It’s resentment, I think, that lights a fire of ambition in our tails and drives us to beat our wings on the porch screen, hoping to reach the incandescent glow of fame and fortune.
And now I wonder what deep-down resentment the late Stephen Ambrose was nursing that motivated him to lie about his closeness to his biographee Dwight D. Eisenhower and claim to have spent hundreds of hours with Ike when, in fact, according to a close examination of the General’s daily diary, Mr. Ambrose probably spent no more than four or five.
When the story came out in The New Yorker last week, I felt ill. I admired the man. I loved “Citizen Soldiers,” about the Battle of the Bulge. He was a deservedly best-selling historian (“D-Day,” “Band of Brothers”), the prolific author of books on Lewis and Clark, George A. Custer, the transcontinental railroad, the Civil War, biographer of Eisenhower and Nixon: Why did the gentleman need to stoop to such a pitiful petty lie? And why did he lift passages from other writers and use them without quotation marks? Did someone make fun of his lack of erudition, growing up in Whitewater, Wisconsin? Did he feel inferior to his doctor dad? A longtime smoker (who died of lung cancer in 2002), maybe Mr. Ambrose was given to tempting fate and playing with fire.
Plagiarism is suicide. It stems from envy, I suppose, or in Ambrose’s case, the rush to produce books in rapid succession, but no matter, it’s a stain that peroxide won’t lift out. All your hard work over a lifetime, blighted by the word “plagiarism” every time somebody writes about you. It’s in the third or fourth graph of your obituary, a splotch on your escutcheon....