The Great Impostor: The Amazing Career of Ferdinand Waldo Demara, who Posed as a Surgeon, a Prison Warden, a Doctor of Philosophy, A Trappist Monk and Many, Many Others

Robert Crichton

Eph 2016 · Kuthengiswe ngu-Sarah Crichton Books

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In this forthright account of a remarkable fraud in Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Robert Crichton presents the man, his reasons, and his methods. A New York Times bestseller when it was originally published in 1959, and serving as the inspiration for the Tony Curtis film of the same name, this is the fascinating and disturbing story of America’s Great Impostor.

The fantastic lives and careers of Ferdinand Waldo Demara make a fantastic irony of the platitude that truth is stranger than fiction. For with Ferdinand Demara, truth is fiction.

Demara wanted to be a hero, to lead an epic life dedicated to the benefit of others, and to gain adulation for himself, and he did all those things by lying to others about who he was. During his storied career, Ferdinand Demara managed to “become” a Trappist monk; a doctor of psychology and Dean of the School of Philosophy at a small college in Pennsylvania; a law student, zoology graduate, cancer researcher and teacher at a junior college in Maine; a surgeon-lieutenant in the Royal Canadian Navy (as medical officer on the destroyed Cayuga, he successfully performed major surgery); a brilliant assistant warden of a Texas prison; and a teacher and beloved idol of the children on a Maine island village.

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Robert Crichton (1925-1993) was a novelist and magazine writer. Born in New Mexico, Crichton spent most of his life in New York after serving in the Army during World War II in the Battle of the Bulge and graduating from Harvard in 1951. Crichton's first book, The Great Impostor (1960), told the true story of Fred Demara, an impostor who successfully assumed scores of guises including that of a Trappist monk, Texas prison warden and surgeon in the Royal Canadian Navy. The bestselling book was adapted into a 1961 movie starring Tony Curtis. A follow-up, The Rascal and the Road, was a memoir about Crichton's adventures with Demara.