Monday, August 19, 2013

Author Bio: Pittacus Lore

I'd like to show you a picture of Pittacus Lore, author of this week's review book, I Am Number Four. But I can't do that, because he doesn't exist.

This is the photo from the "About the Author" on the book flap.

Pittacus Lore is a pseudonym for two authors working jointly to write the Lorien Legacies series.



This is James Frey. He is one of the two people who make up Pittacus Lore. You may remember him as the author of A Million Little Pieces, the book that enraged millions of Oprah Winfrey's followers because it claimed to be a memoir but was mainly fictionalized. (You may recall me talking about this before.) At least the Lorien Legacies admit that they're fiction. (Which is good, since they're about aliens hiding from other aliens on Earth...)


This is Jobie Hughes, the other half of Pittacus Lore. His website lists only one novel, At Dawn, published in 2012. There is very little other information about him.

Pittacus Lore is much like Lemony Snicket, in that he is mentioned within the stories he is authoring. At first, I thought Pittacus Lore was just a poorly chosen pseudonym by someone who didn't mind everyone knowing that his name was a pseudonym. I even read the little blurb about the author on the book flap... it says that he's an elder of Lorien, hiding on Earth. So I thought this was just a particularly pretentious author with a bad pseudonym.

Then I got maybe 100 pages into I Am Number Four, and saw that Pittacus Lore was mentioned in the story. To the internet I went, and learned the truth. Which is a little better than my assumptions before, I suppose.

10 comments:

  1. We need more facts!!!

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  2. cna you tell us more...like are they still alive

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  3. Here's more: The website for the series is http://iamnumberfourfans.com/pittacus-lore/ and the Wikipedia page for James Frey is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Frey (or if you'd rather, the Wikipedia page for the Lorien Legacy series is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorien_Legacies ). There isn't much specific information because (1) it's a pseudonym so he's not a real person, and (2) putting too much about him out as biographical would probably give away parts of the series (I haven't read them all, but I imagine that details about him might give away details of Lorien and its story).

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  4. This isn't very informative.
    And I have read everything except for the last book which is only almost out. One of the best series' I've ever read!

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    1. Hi there, this is Alex, author of this post. What more, exactly, do you want to know? If you Google either author's name, you get their websites. They both have Wikipedia pages. This post (and this blog) was never intended to be particularly in-depth. We wanted to provide brief introductions to (and occasionally our opinions on) authors, books, and ideas that you can go out and learn more about on your own. But if there's something I can look up for you, post it here and I'll do my best. I see the question above about whether the authors are still alive... Wikipedia says yes, as of the time of this writing.

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  5. Thanks for letting me know that I can ask, I appreciate it. I'm actually looking for info for a project that I'm doing on the background, youth etc. of a poet?writer?playwright of my choice and I have chosen Pittacus Lore. The info about the "ghost writer" is really helpful as I first thought Pittacus was a pseudonym for one person!

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