Five Great Literary Pranksters

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3. Ken Kesey and the Great Smithsonian Prank

Speaking of Merry Pranksters, let's talk about Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and an all-around expert jokester. Kesey allegedly faked his own death too, but that incident doesn't really count as a prank since he hoped to actually get away with it and evade imprisonment for possession of marijuana. No, the grand hoodwinking we'll be looking at today came about two decades after Kesey's staged suicide, when the man was older, wiser, but no less wily.

The whole thing started when representatives from the Smithsonian Institution attempted to obtain his psychedelically-painted bus "Further," which carried his troublemaking group the Merry Pranksters all over America in the 1960s (journeys later chronicled by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test). According to Wikipedia, Further was in bad disrepair, but the Smithsonian was willing to restore it. However, in a contemporary Seattle Times article, the Smithsonian claims they were never able to reach Kesey directly.

Regardless of who said what and when, Kesey invited several journalists to his farm, where he and a few original Pranksters unveiled a fully restored and operational Further. He told the reporters he had struck a deal and would be personally delivering the bus to the Smithsonian. The Pranksters and journalists then boarded this supposed Further and set out for Washington D.C.

After several days of aimless driving and book promotion, it soon became clear that A.) this bus was not the original Further, but a somewhat close reproduction, and B.) there was no deal with the Smithsonian. In fact, representatives from the institution insisted they were no longer interested in Further, having abandoned any plans to obtain the bus years ago. 

The trip to Washington was nothing more than a media stunt designed to make the Smithsonian people look bad. Kesey claimed the reason they "weren't able to reach him directly" was because they never even tried, presumably going behind his back to obtain Further for their collection. For this offense, they and the media "deserved a little pranking." 

I'm not sure how effective Kesey's actions were, but at least the event showed that the author still had some tricks up his sleeve long after the Pranksters' heyday was over. As Jeff Barnard, author of the aforementioned Seattle Times article, notes, "Kesey said the spirit of the bus was more important than its body, and the spirit was alive and well."

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4. Edgar Allan Poe and The Balloon-Hoax

The granddaddy of the suspenseful and macabre, Edgar Allan Poe is a well-know influence on Arthur Conan Doyle, Stephen King, Peter Straub, and a host of other horror/crime writers. But you may not know that Poe also inspired one of the most well-known science fiction writers of the 19th century, and did so by fabricating an elaborate hoax in the New York newspaper The Sun.

The story goes, Poe was upset with Sun editor Richard Adam Locke for plagiarizing his short story "The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaal," a lesser-know work dealing with a trip to the moon (Locke had taken numerous elements from Poe's story and constructed a fake news story about moon exploration). As a peace offering, Poe was allowed to write a series of articles detailing European balloonist Monck Mason's three-day trip across the Atlantic Ocean in a "lighter-than-air" aircraft. 

Presented as a factual account, the story was no more true than the aforementioned moon voyage piece, and was quickly outed as a hoax two days after publication. Though the retraction went unsigned, it is believed Poe himself wrote the brief blurb admitting the paper's leg-pulling. 

Though brief, the story did manage to excite fervor among The Sun's dedicated readers, much to Poe's delight. From Wikipedia, quoting Jeffrey Meyers's book Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy:

Poe himself describes the enthusiasm his story had aroused: he claims that the Sun building was "besieged" by people wanting copies of the newspaper. 'I never witnessed more intense excitement to get possession of a newspaper,' he wrote.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that people were taken in by the erroneous tale: Poe inserted many factual elements into his piece, including the presence on the journey of fellow author and historian William Harrison Ainsworth, and the slightly-tweaked use of the name Monck Mason, a fictionalization of real-life balloonist Thomas Monck Mason.

While the Balloon-Antics is perhaps not one of Poe's most well-known exploits, it does bear a fairly significant footnote: the expedient journey across the Atlantic Ocean was a direct influence on Jules Verne's seminal tale of ballooning adventure Around The World in Eighty-Days. Poe was clearly pleased at the number of people fooled by his articles, but this more concrete literary impression could surely be considered the best result of the prank.

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5. Orson Welles and The War of The Worlds

This prank is so infamous at this point, I wonder if I even need to explain it. But, just in case you are indeed unfamiliar with this epic troll, allow me to elaborate: in 1938, one day before Halloween (another trickster's holiday), the soon-to-be celebrated writer/director of Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil, and numerous other films decided to perform something a little different for his radio show Mercury Theatre on the Air. For that week's literary adaptation, Welles chose The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells's classic tale of alien invasion, with the twist being that any acknowledgment of this broadcast being staged (announcers identifying the piece's title, author, and players; pausing for station identification or commercial breaks) would be removed; in other words, Welles decided to play the adaptation off as a news broadcast covering an actual alien invasion (though in fact there are two brief announcements about forty and fifty-five minutes into the program, respectively, that identify the performance as a work of fiction, but Welles supposedly timed these in the hopes listeners would miss them).

Now, as Ryan Peverly recently pointed out, we've always been told that Welles's little prank on the susceptible public resulted in mass hysteria, with citizens flooding the phone lines to call their loved ones, power outages, and angry mobs forming to ward off the Martian threat. We've learned, however, that panic might not have been so widespread, that the newspapers over-exaggerated public response to pointedly defame Welles and the medium of radio in general, considering it to be an inferior source of news. This Slate article has more details, but author Jefferson Pooley and Michael Socolow seem bent on defaming Welles themselves, claiming not only that panic was so minuscule it's barely worth mentioning, but also that hardly anyone even heard the broadcast. 

As with anything contentious, the truth probably resides at neither extremes (a blip that got blown out of proportion vs. total mass hysteria, dogs and cats sleeping together, etc.), but rather smack in the middle. Regardless, the point is, Welles did set out to hoodwink some people, and he was pleased that he succeeded. Check out the below clip from Welles's apology the day after the incident, called "best performance as an actor" by filmmaker Peter Bogdonavich.