Click Here For Writers Who Lie (Sorry, Alex Haley is Guilty)

History News Network: "'Alex was a man with many compartments and nobody knew them all,' observed his last agent, John Hawkins. One might even call Haley a literary Kim Philby. Like a master spy, Haley could persuasively lie about anything: where he grew up and went to school, what he wrote while in the Coast Guard, how much money he earned, his family, little lies about store food that he passed off as home-cooked, and big lies like stripping down to his shorts and staying 10 nights in the darkened hold of the freighter African Star, which sailed from Dakar to Florida in 1973, in order to divine the agony of Kunta Kint�s crossing. ('That never happened,' said Frank Ewers, the Star�s former first mate. 'I had the keys to the hold and Haley never went down there at night. He would have died from the cocoa fumes.')"