7 Famous Writers Who May Not Have Actually Existed

The question of authorship has always been a fascinating one. When a book is published, people tend to take for granted that the person who wrote it is a real living, breathing human being. With a brief author's bio and a smiling picture, why would you question it? What would be the point of making up an identity? As it turns out there are plenty of reasons why a person or company might want to present somebody as real when they're not: like if that person happens to be saying nice things about your company, or is purporting to have lived an incredibly interesting (and marketable) life. On top of that, the further back in time we travel, the harder it is to truly prove a person's existence, even those figures who are considered household names. From the Bard himself William Shakespeare to a certain troubled teenager whose diary has been in print for over forty years, here are seven famous writers who might not have actually existed...

7. Homer

No, I'm not talking about the yellow-fleshed Simpson. I'm talking about one of the most influential writers in human history, the man responsible for penning two literary cornerstones, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Iliad details events during the Trojan War, a ten-year siege of the city of Troy. Specifically, it deals with the quarrel that takes place between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles. The Odyssey, on the other hand, concerns Odysseus, focusing on his journey home after the fall of Troy and the various challenges he encounters along the way. When most people think of Homer, they think of a writer from ancient Greece, but what most people don't know is that even they considered Homer to be a legendary figure from long in the past. It turns out that we aren't even sure that Homer was a real person. We certainly don't know when he lived or whether he actually did. Historical accounts of Homer differ wildly, frequently placing his life centuries apart. This is mainly due to the fact that anybody who ever wrote about him was doing so from a time hundreds of years after he supposedly lived. In fact, there are many scholars who actually believe that Homer was merely a pseudonym that was used by multiple different writers.