Last week I had finished reading Tom Sharpe's The Great Pursuit about a guy lending his name to a book by an anonymous author who didn't want to attach his name to his book. With dry Sharpe humor, it turned out to be an intellectual plot peppered with some dramatic action between London & New York, as the 'pseudo writer' becomes famous and carves out a 'fictitious' life of his own, extracting revenge in the bargain.
The 1951 movie, 'The Front' ,which I watched yesterday, had Woody Allen playing a cashier at a restaurant, masquerading as a writer , when he actually was a 'front' for a set of blacklisted 'communist' authors. He sees this as his escape from the drudgery of the cash register, but this is the cold war '50's and the FBI is hot on trial of any communist whiff. The relationship formed with a beautiful TV production manager, as a result of the weekly 'scripts' he is providing, form the rest of the interesting story till an abrupt ending leaves you thinking about the need to be truthful !
Quite a set of coincidental stories of pretentious authors and consequences of 'borrowed fame' to swallow in the Ides of March!
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