Max Harris Intro (1 results)

Paperback. Ern Malley & Max Harris (intro), Mary Martin Publications, Adelaide. Condition remarks:Book: Fair Jacket: No dust jacketPages: Good Markings: No markingsCondition remarks: Condition as shown in image. New paper clip taped on back of binding. One of the most celebrated literary hoaxes in history, Ern Malley's Poems presents the complete collected works of a poet who never existed - a fictional modernist genius invented in a single afternoon in 1943 by two conservative Australian poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, as a deliberate act of sabotage against the avant-garde. The poems were submitted to Max Harris, the ambitious young editor of the modernist literary journal Angry Penguins, who accepted them with great enthusiasm, hailing the fictitious Ern Malley as a towering new voice in Australian literature. The subsequent exposure of the hoax became a national scandal, resulting in Harris's public humiliation and even an obscenity prosecution over the poems' content. Yet the story took an ironic and enduring turn: the poems themselves, composed carelessly and with satirical contempt, were widely recognized by later critics as genuinely accomplished works of surrealist verse, standing as a testament to the unpredictable nature of artistic creation. This collection remains a fascinating artifact at the intersection of literary politics, modernism, and the philosophy of authorship, as compelling for its cultural history as for the strange, haunting beauty of the poems themselves. Paperback.