What was The C.S. Lewis Hoax?
The C.S. Lewis Hoax was a book by Kathryn Lindskoog published in 1988. It directed a number of allegations at Walter Hooper and the C.S. Lewis estate: most notably that Hooper had lied about rescuing unpublished works by Lewis from a bonfire; that he had exaggerated the length and intimacy of his friendship with Lewis; and that some of Lewis’s minor posthumous works, including The Dark Tower and two of the essays in Boxen are not by Lewis at all, but forgeries by Walter Hooper. It does seem to be a fact that Hooper only worked with Lewis for a period of a few weeks in 1963 (this fact is agreed by all Lewis’s biographers) and not the ‘many years’ claimed in some dust jacket blurbs. In 1995, forensic document examiner Nancy H. Cole of Palo Alto, CA compared the MS of the Dark Tower and other contested works with known examples of Lewis’s and Hooper’s handwriting. Although it is true that Hooper’s handwriting is very similar to Lewis’s, Cole lists six characteristics which the Dark Tower
