Profile of “Education of Little Tree” Author — Asa Earl Carter/Forrest Carter

Here, via Pechanga.

An excerpt:

(MONROE, WA) — This is one of those almost unbelievable stories that, if it were the plot of a movie script, no one would buy it. The story seems too far out there. It is also a story of the failure – not to mention the gullibility – of many in the news business, the TV business and the book-publishing world to sniff out a phony.

Some readers may be familiar with this story as the information in it is not new. But many younger readers likely have never heard the tall tale of a man named Asa.

It is the true tale of how a Ku Klux Klan man who once wrote speeches for the late segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace (until he thought Wallace had gone “soft” and sold out to liberals) who then later, as a reinvented “Native American” writer named Forrest Carter, was praised by Oprah Winfrey and others.

It is the stunning story of a man many might consider dangerous who, from all accounts, could shape shift himself at will into a new past, a new present and a new identity – of a non-white person of all things – and go on to become a best selling American writer.

It’s the saga of a man preaching a vision from a grand stage constructed from nothing but swamp gas and dime store illusions and how no one, from book publishers and editors to famous TV news people to print and TV interviewers caught on to his real identity.

He took them all down for the count in perhaps one of the greatest straight up con jobs ever pulled on the American media.

He got the fame, the money, success and easily carried off what con artists call “the long con.”