Ghostwriting in the 19th century
Posted Jan 19, 2006 4:28 UTC (Thu) by
xoddam (subscriber, #2322)
In reply to:
No problem by man_ls
Parent article:
There Is No Open Source Community (O'ReillyNet)
The primary 'ghost' was Friedrich Engels, who got second-author credit on
most of their later joint work. This isn't very controversial.
Karl Marx didn't write English particularly well when he was first
employed to write for the New York Tribune, so he asked Engels to
translate for him; and for six months while he was in a rough patch
(three sick children, one died) he asked Engels to do the whole job (and
commended him on having 'found the right tone'). Parts of some of these
Marx/Engels columns were published under the by-line of the editor Horace
Greeley.
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1957...
Later, other 'students' and benefactors of Marx were also pleased to help
his work in such ways. In our day of carefully dated copyright
attribution it might seem strange, but it wasn't so unusual in the 19th
century for work to be published without every conceivable credit. It
probably wouldn't happen in the free software world, but I'm sure there
are people writing today who collaborate or ghostwrite privately like
this.
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