The Lee Israel Story: Letter Forgery in the Modern Era
Lee Israel’s forgery career is one of the most instructive cases in the history of literary fraud — not because of the scale of her crimes (she forged approximately 400 letters over two years) but because of the clarity with which her story illuminates how literary forgery works, why it succeeds, and what it reveals about the weaknesses of the rare book and autograph market.
Who Lee Israel Was
Lee Israel (1939–2014) was a New York writer and biographer whose legitimate career produced two well-received books: Kilgallen (1979), a biography of journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, and Estée Lauder: Beyond the Magic (1985). A third biography, of the actress Tallulah Bankhead, was published in 1972.
By the early 1990s, Israel’s career had stalled. Her proposed biography of Fanny Brice was rejected by publishers. She was broke, alcoholic, and unable to pay her rent in Manhattan. Her cat needed veterinary care she could not afford. In desperation, she turned to a form of crime that exploited her considerable literary talents: forging letters from famous dead writers.
How the Forgery Worked
Israel’s method was both sophisticated and, in retrospect, alarmingly simple:
Research
Israel haunted the special collections of the New York Public Library, the Butler Library at Columbia, and other institutions, studying genuine letters by the authors she planned to impersonate. She took careful notes on their handwriting, their vocabulary, their epistolary style, their characteristic phrases, and the specific events and relationships referenced in their correspondence.
Composition
Israel did not merely copy existing letters — she composed new ones. Drawing on her deep knowledge of her subjects’ lives and writing styles, she created plausible letters that sounded authentic. She knew the authors’ literary friendships, feuds, and gossip, and she wove these into her fabrications. A forged letter from Dorothy Parker referenced real cocktail parties, real literary quarrels, and real New York restaurants. A forged letter from Noël Coward deployed his actual wit and cadence.
This is what made Israel’s forgeries distinctive: they were not crude physical fakes but literary performances. She wrote as Parker, as Coward, as Lillian Hellman, as Edna Ferber — inhabiting their voices with a biographer’s trained ear.
Physical Production
Israel typed her forgeries on period-appropriate typewriters (she owned several vintage machines) and used paper stock consistent with the era. For handwritten elements — signatures, brief annotations, corrections — she practiced the authors’ handwriting extensively before executing each letter.
She also engaged in a more brazen form of fraud: she visited libraries and archives, removed genuine letters from their collections, and replaced them with her own forgeries. The stolen genuine letters provided her with authentic examples to sell, while the forgeries she left behind went undetected for months or years.
Sales
Israel sold her forged letters through manuscript dealers and autograph galleries in Manhattan. The letters typically sold for $100–$500 each — modest sums that, multiplied across hundreds of forgeries, provided enough income to sustain her. She was careful not to flood the market with letters from any single author, and she spread her sales across multiple dealers to avoid pattern detection.
Why the Forgeries Succeeded
Israel’s forgeries worked for several reasons that remain relevant to today’s rare book and autograph market:
Content quality. The letters were convincingly written. Dealers and buyers who read them found them delightful and characteristic of their supposed authors. The literary quality was, ironically, a testament to Israel’s genuine talent.
Low individual value. At $100–$500 per letter, the sums involved were too small to trigger intensive authentication. No dealer was going to spend $200 authenticating a $300 letter. This is a fundamental vulnerability of the autograph market: the economics of authentication break down for mid-range material.
Trusting market. The literary autograph market in the early 1990s operated largely on trust. Dealers knew each other, bought from familiar sources, and relied on their own expertise rather than scientific analysis. Israel exploited this trust systematically.
Library thefts went undetected. The libraries from which Israel stole genuine letters often did not discover the thefts for months or years. The stolen genuine letters, once in Israel’s possession, could be sold as authentically provenanced material (since they were genuine), while the forgeries she left in the archives went unchallenged.
How She Was Caught
Israel’s downfall began when a dealer noticed that two letters from different authors, sold by the same seller, shared an unusual typewriter character — a distinctive flaw in one of Israel’s vintage machines. This physical evidence triggered suspicion, and further investigation by the FBI and the literary autograph community revealed the scope of her fraud.
Israel was arrested in 1993 and pleaded guilty to federal charges of conspiracy to transport stolen property. She was sentenced to five years of probation, six months of house arrest, and community service. She was also required to make restitution.
The Aftermath
Israel wrote about her crimes in a memoir, Can You Ever Forgive Me? Memoirs of a Literary Forger (2008), which was adapted into a critically acclaimed 2018 film starring Melissa McCarthy. The film brought Israel’s story to a wide audience and raised public awareness of literary forgery.
The case had lasting effects on the autograph and manuscript trade:
Increased scepticism. Dealers became more cautious about unsourced literary letters, particularly those appearing in quantity from a single seller.
Library security. Institutions tightened their special collections security, implementing stricter access controls, surveillance, and inventory verification.
Provenance awareness. The Israel case reinforced the importance of provenance documentation. A letter with a clear chain of custody — from the author’s estate to a specific dealer to a specific collector — is far more trustworthy than a letter that appears out of nowhere.
Lessons for Collectors
Israel’s story offers several practical lessons for anyone buying literary autographs or signed books:
Provenance matters. A letter or signed book with documented ownership history is more trustworthy than one without. “From a private collection” is not provenance — it is the absence of provenance.
Content quality does not guarantee authenticity. Israel’s forgeries were beautifully written — that was the whole point. A letter that sounds authentic is not necessarily authentic. Content must be corroborated by physical evidence and provenance.
Low-value items are the most vulnerable. The economics of authentication create a sweet spot for forgers: items worth enough to be sold but not enough to justify rigorous testing. Collectors should be especially cautious about mid-range autograph material ($100–$1,000) from unverified sources.
Scientific analysis can catch what expertise misses. Typewriter identification, ink analysis, paper dating, and other forensic techniques can detect forgeries that even expert eyes miss. For valuable purchases, scientific analysis is worth the cost.
The market self-corrects, but slowly. Israel operated for two years before detection. The market eventually identified the problem, but not before hundreds of forgeries had entered circulation — many of which remain in private collections, undetected, to this day. This is a sobering reminder that the autograph market contains an unknown quantity of unidentified fakes.
Israel’s story was adapted into the 2018 film Can You Ever Forgive Me?, starring Melissa McCarthy, which brought the case to mainstream attention and renewed interest in the mechanics of literary forgery.