Besides being important figures in American history and letters, what do Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln and many others have in common? All had documents forged in their name by Utah’s Mark Hofmann.
There’s a moment in the Netflix docuseries Murder Among the Mormons when co-director Tyler Measom asks Shannon Flynn if Hofmann really was the best forger of all times. Flynn, a long-time associate of Hofmann’s, replies, “Don’t ask me that. I don’t want to make a hero out of him, because he was fantastic. No one has come close to doing what he has done.” We’ll talk this Friday at noon about Hofmann’s work as a forger, first with archivist Daniel Lombardo, who, in 1997, purchased what he believed to be an undiscovered Emily Dickinson poem written in her own hand and then with Hofmann expert and author Simon Worrall.
GUESTS
- Daniel Lombardo is the former curator of Special Collections at the Jones Library of Amherst, Massachusetts. He is now a theater director and writer.
- Simon Worrall is the author of The Poet and the Murderer : A True Story of Verse, Violence and the Art of Forgery. [IndieBound|Amazon|Audible| Bookshop]
