When Philip Roth was checking himself out online (we all do it), he came upon something unexpected on the Wikipedia entry for his novel “The Human Stain.” Apparently, it was inspired
(Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)
by the life of writer Anatole Broyard. It was unexpected, because he we was pretty sure that the novel he wrote was not inspired by the life of Anatole Broyard.
Finding inaccuracies on Wikipedia isn’t uncommon – people fixing mistakes is how the site works. So Roth sent a letter to Wikipedia saying that he was Philip Roth, and that being Philip Roth, he could speak with some certainty about the content of his books.
This is when the story gets odd – a letter came back from Wikipedia saying that having written the book in question just wasn’t reliable enough – ““I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work,” a “Wikpedia Adminstrator” told him. “But we require a secondary source.”
Roth was confused, and so he did what any giant of the American literary scene can do in these circumstances, and wrote a lengthy open letter to Wikipedia in the New Yorker (from which the above quotation is taken). It’s a very long explanation of all the ways in which Roth does not know Anatole Broyard, and how the story of “The Human Stain” was, in fact, inspired by the life of Melvin Turmin, a Princeton professor who had gone through an ordeal after he referred to two absent African-American students as “spooks.”
After the Roth published the letter, Wikipedia did correct the entry in question. Depending on how you look at it, it’s either a condemnation or validation of Wikipedia – condemnation because it took so long to get it fixed, but validation because it did, in fact, get fixed.
It’s also worth noting that if you look very closely in the scene where Anthony Hopkins and Gary Sinise are jogging in the film version of the novel, a high school-age Dave Thier can be found hiding behind a bush.