The Runner: A True Account of the Amazing Lies and Fantastical Adventures of the Ivy League Impostor James Hogue - Hardcover

Samuels, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 159558188X ISBN 13: 9781595581884

Publisher: New Press, 2008

Synopsis

A classic american story of a homeless drifter who tries to start a new life by applying to Princeton University, based on the acclaimed New Yorker article.

Based on one of the most talked-about New Yorker articles from the past decade—soon to be a major motion picture.

On the morning of March 30, 1988, a police detective named Matt Jacobson arrived at a storage facility in St. George, Utah, with a warrant to search for stolen bicycles. Among the stolen goods and dusty athletic trophies in Locker 100, Jacobson also found some recent correspondence showing that the thief, James Hogue, had been dreaming of a new and better life as a person named Alexi Santana—a self-educated Nevada cowboy who could run a mile in just over four minutes and had applied for admission to some of America's finest universities, including Stanford, Princeton, and Brown.

Thus began a classic American narrative of self-invention that falls somewhere between The Great Gatsby and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Hogue's story—how he fooled the Princeton University admissions department, got straight A's, made the Princeton track team, dated a millionaire's daughter, and was accepted into the elite Ivy Club before his deception was finally exposed—turns out to be both an intensely affecting profile of a dreamer and the limits of his dream, and a striking indictment of the Ivy League "meritocracy" to which Hogue wanted so badly to belong.

Taking off from his widely read New Yorker article, David Samuels adds substantial new reporting, telling the sad story of Hogue's itinerant life after he was expelled from Princeton and providing fascinating new insights into the Ivy League's most famous impostor.

About this title

About the Author:

David Samuels is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.

From Publishers Weekly:

In this extended riff on Samuels's New Yorker article of the same name, the author pursues James Hogue, portrayed as a cunning, intelligent drifter who at age 28, in 1988, created a new identity for himself as Alexi Santana, a 16-year-old cowboy, who became the Princeton University admissions committee's darling. Santana's Princeton matriculation was delayed because, unbeknownst to school authorities, Hogue was doing time for bicycle theft. One year later, Santana, a talented runner, entered the school without a hitch until a track meet spectator outed the impostor during his sophomore year. Though Samuels has a gift for contextualizing people and events, he misses his mark in this repetitive and fragmented profile. He is so taken by his elusive subject, whom he calls a convicted fabulist, that he lets Hogue, a compulsive liar and criminal with repeated offenses, off the hook far too easily. To Samuels, Hogue's behavior is as harmless as the youthful lies the author formerly told strangers on airplanes. But the lie and the con are not one and the same, and the reader winces as Hogue cons his way past Samuels's otherwise intelligent grasp. (Mar.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: New Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 159558188X
• ISBN 13: 9781595581884
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 192