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Not everyone is inspired, and this is why when it comes
to racking the brains many people take the easy way out and opt to just copy
what they need. There have been cases when many authors became a little more
than inspired and resorted to blatant plagiarism.
Let’s look at the three most notorious cases of
plagiarism in the publishing industry:
Rand Paul’s book,
Government Bullies
When we talk about plagiarism, the latest case that comes
to the mind is of Rand Paul. The famous Kentucky Senator wrote Government Bullies which maybe should’ve
gotten him an award, but that didn’t happen. However, the book DID make him
famous, primarily because it was copied from the 2003 Heritage Foundation case
study. With 1,318 words copied and pasted into his book, the senator probably
didn’t know that plagiarism is really easy to catch these days.
Alex Haley’s book,
Roots
I’m sure we all remember the case of Alex Haley’s Roots, which won a Pulitzer Prize.
Although Haley said that he did a lot of research into his own ancestors, it
was later learned that the book was actually copied from The African by Harold Courlander. What followed was a high profile
lawsuit that was won by Courlander. It was not just a notorious case of
plagiarism, but also the Pulitzer Prize winning book was not non-fiction, or
even well-researched for that matter.
Doris Kearns
Goodwin’s The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys
You might think that Haley was probably the only Pulitzer
Prize winning author who landed in the plagiarism soup, but you would be wrong.
Doris Kearns Goodwins (yes, the same writer who won the Pulitzer in 1995),
wrote a book called The Fitzgeralds and
the Kennedys. As anyone would assume, a book written by an award winning
author would be genuine. However, the book was copied from several sources.
This led people to believe that her Pulitzer Prize winning book No Ordinary Time might also be a
plagiarized copy.
