Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Lee Israel was born in New York City on December 3, 1939. She received a bachelor's degree in speech from Brooklyn College in 1961. In the 1960s and 1970s, she was a freelance writer, contributing articles on film, theater, and television to several publications including The New York Times and Soap Opera Digest. Her first book, Miss Tallulah Bankhead, was published in 1972. Her other biographies include Kilgallen and Estée Lauder: Beyond the Magic.

In the early 1990s, she became a literary forger because her career was at a standstill and she could not handle getting a real job. She composed and sold hundreds of letters that she said had been written by the likes of Edna Ferber, Dorothy Parker, Noël Coward, and Lillian Hellman. She dealt with typed letters, which only required her to copy the signatures. When talk concerning the authenticity of her wares made composing new letters too risky, she began stealing actual letters from archives and leaving duplicates in their place. She was captured by the F.B.I., and in June 1993, she pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to transport stolen property in interstate commerce. She was sentenced to six months' house arrest and five years' probation.

This experience was documented in Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Memoirs of a Literary Forger, which was published in 2008. In recent years, she worked as a copy editor for Scholastic magazines. She died from complications of myeloma on December 24, 2014 at the age of 75.

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