In this thread, I was reminded of Pat Murphy’s “Max Merriwell” trilogy (never marketed as such, but clearly one) and how two of the books were by fictional authors.
There and Back Again was by “Max Merriwell.” Wild Angel was by “Mary Maxwell,” a pseudonym of Merriwell Through Time and Space with Max Merriwell is by Murphy, though it might be by Merriwell’s alter ego “Weldon Maxwell.” “Pat Murphy” is also a character.
There’s also Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream, which, once you get past the cover material, is actually Lords of the Swastika by Adolph Hitler.
And Philip Jose Farmer channeled Kilgore Trout for Venus on the Half Shell.
I’m not looking for pseudonyms, but rather a book purportedly written by a literary character or historical figure for literary effect.
Excepting that some pseudonymous authors have little or no background material and some have elaborately constructed personal histories, what’s the difference? A pseudonymously written work is just that, whether it’s by John Doe or Kilgore Trout.
Does the ‘nomad of the time streams’ trilogy count? Michael Moorcock wrote them but used strange literary devices to introduce each one. One was supposed to be a manuscript written by his grandfather and another one was supposed to be written by Oswald Bastable who was the main character.
There’s been more than one Necronomicon (supposedly by the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred*) published.
As far as I know, nobody ever published any of the other Cthulhu Mythos works made up by other authors – The Unausprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, or De Vermis Mysteriis.
Nor the The Book of Eibon or Robert E, Howard’s non-Cthulhu Book of Sjelos.
*A construction which, according to Lovecraft annotators, makes no sense.
Short version. Arthur Train wrote mysteries about Ephraim Tutt for a quarter century. When he got old, he produced an entire autobiography and published it under Tutt’s name. The world, with its usual short memory, was fooled. You can still find occasional articles of people picking up the book and thinking it was a real history.
Would *I, Claudius *be an example of what you’re looking for?
Written in first person narrative from the POV of Claudius. However, the cover of the book showed that it was written by Robert Graves, no pretence that it was actually written by Claudius.
No. There are thousands of novels written in the first person. I’m looking for those where the actual author listed as fictional character (in that novel or for other reasons) in the byline.
A couple of the “textbooks” from Hogwarts were published, including “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” by Newt Scamander, as well as another one on Quidditch.
I think “Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook,” which was introduced in Terry Pratchett’s “Maskerade”, has also been published.
Oswald Bastable was the narrator of a couple of E Nesbit 's novels , including * The Wouldbegoods *, though I found no allusions to the his backstory in ( I think ) * The Warlord of the Air * by Moorcock .
