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Prince of Saint-Germain: The New Yorker
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May 3, 12:46pm
1 review
•http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006...
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From the page:
"In the summer of 1946, however, he made a wager with the head of a struggling publishing house that, given a few weeks, he could produce a best-seller. He sequestered himself for the next fifteen days, emerging to announce that he had discovered and translated a novel by an African-American writer named Vernon Sullivan, who had found no American publisher willing to touch it. The book, titled "I Spit on Your Graves," is a pulpy, grotesque cartoon with a deliberately incendiary plot: a black man, passing for white, murders a pair of wealthy white girls he has seduced after his brother is lynched. Published in French toward the end of 1946, the book initially attracted only minimal notice, until a man named Daniel Parker, the leader of a right-wing morality watchdog group, Cartel d'Action Sociale et Morale, set out to have the book banned and its author, translator, and publisher prosecuted. The book's notoriety increased further when a deranged man strangled his lover in a hotel room, and the police found a copy of the book by the bed. Passages in which the protagonist strangles a woman had been circled.
Riding on this tide of scandal, "I Spit on Your Graves" became the best-selling book in France in 1947. Amid the uproar, Vian maintained that he was merely the translator--he even published a text of the putative English original--but by the end of 1948 he had to admit that there was no Sullivan, and that he was the book's sole author; he was eventually fined a hundred thousand francs for his offense to public morals. By then, a new Sullivan novel had appeared, "The Dead All Have the Same Skin," the story of a white man so repulsed by the fear that he is black that he turns to murder and rape. Vian named him Dan Parker."
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