Who Owns an Idea?

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books.

Plagiarism is constantly in the news. In politics alone, the charge has been leveled at Melania Trump, former Harvard President Claudine Gay, President Joe Biden (long ago), and Vice President Kamala Harris (just this week). In literature and journalism, the accusation is even more commonly thrown around, generating decades-long controversies, resignations, and lawsuits. The surfeit of coverage tends to flatten out the differences in each case, conflating omissions of citations with wholesale lifts of phrasing and ideas. At one end of the spectrum are the likes of Kaavya Viswanathan, a Harvard student whose debut novel patched together the work of authors such as Megan McCafferty and Meg Cabot. At the other end are cases of loose inspiration or even convergences that turn out to be coincidence—and these are most fascinating to me, because they force me to rethink what originality really means.

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Mark Athitakis’s recent Atlantic article about Sanora Babb, a woman whose field notes on California migrants helped John Steinbeck write The Grapes of Wrath, is explicitly not about outright theft. Never mind that the wild success of Grapes led to the shelving of Babb’s own novel about the Dust Bowl crisis. Riding Like the Wind, a new biography of Babb, asserts instead that Steinbeck “appropriated her writing without credit,” Athitakis writes; “it also suggests that the scope and perspective” of Grapes became clear only with the help of reports Babb had written as a volunteer for the Farm Security Administration.

Babb’s novel, Whose Names Are Unknown—which was finally published in 2004—has a plot that rhymes with Steinbeck’s, “especially in the later chapters,” Athitakis concludes. Though this hobbled Babb’s career, she was stung less by the similarities in Steinbeck’s plot than by the fact that her (stylistically very different) novel received no attention. What this muddy incident shares with more clear-cut cases of plagiarism is a failure to give credit where it’s due.

Absent egregious examples of intellectual theft, how can we determine without a doubt what truly belongs to one writer versus another? After all, you can’t copyright an idea. And multiple people can independently imagine the same scenario: For example, one prominent copyright-infringement lawsuit relied in part on the improbability of a climactic incident that appeared in two separate works. (An outside firm placed the odds at one in 8 sextillion.) But the case was dismissed; as Lincoln Michel noted savvily in a Literary Hub essay about the affair, probability in life has little to do with plausibility in art. Michel added that the fictional scenario in question had occurred before—to Homer Simpson, in the early 1990s. “The point of ‘The Simpsons did it’ meme is that basically every idea has been done by the long-running show, and by extension every idea has been done by someone,” he wrote.

The man most responsible for Babb’s professional setback was not Steinbeck but Bennett Cerf, a co-founder of Alfred A. Knopf, who withdrew a deal to publish her novel on the grounds that “obviously, another book at this time about exactly the same subject would be a sad anticlimax!” For Athitakis, Babb’s downfall owed more to corporate shortsightedness than it did to appropriation: “A short-term judgment about what the market will bear can choke off a literary legacy and, to some extent, impoverish a culture.”

Which brings us, oddly, to artificial intelligence. In Ayad Akhtar’s new play, McNeal, a downtrodden novelist played by Robert Downey Jr. points out that Shakespeare’s King Lear shares 70 percent of its words with a predecessor play, King Leir. In an Atlantic interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, Akhtar said that the way AI “thinks” (which features heavily in the play) reminds him of how Shakespeare reprocessed his own knowledge and experience, producing many variations until he landed on something we consider brilliantly original. Whether AI can achieve true imagination is an open question, but for now, what separates humans from machines is not the ability to invent out of whole cloth—it’s the skill required to create something new out of something old.

The Woman Who Would Be Steinbeck

By Mark Athitakis

John Steinbeck beat Sanora Babb to the great American Dust Bowl novel—using her field notes. What do we owe her today?

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What to Read

Anatomy of Injustice, by Raymond Bonner

Every wrongful-conviction story is tragic and pitiful, but the ordeal of Edward Lee Elmore is especially so, as Bonner’s tightly written account of his case makes clear. The book opens with the 1982 murder of a well-off elderly white woman, Dorothy Edwards, in Greenwood, South Carolina—a murder for which Elmore, an intellectually disabled Black handyman, is swiftly convicted and sentenced to death. But the story really gains momentum when a defense attorney named Diana Holt, whom Bonner profiled for The Atlantic in 2012, becomes convinced of Elmore’s innocence and decides to fight to win him a new trial. Holt has grit: She’s a former runaway who, in her youth, survived all manner of hellish abuse. Still, she struggles to overcome the fact that once a person is convicted in a court of law, not even exonerating new evidence guarantees that they’ll get off death row, never mind get another shot at justice. Elmore, through no shortage of legal miracles, eventually sees the outside of a jail cell, but it’s a victory tainted by the irrevocable wrongs done to him, which is why Bonner dares not call his release justice. — Jared Sullivan

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Your Weekend Read

Point Nemo, the Most Remote Place on Earth

By Cullen Murphy

It’s called the “longest-swim problem”: If you had to drop someone at the place in the ocean farthest from any speck of land—the remotest spot on Earth—where would that place be? The answer, proposed only a few decades ago, is a location in the South Pacific with the coordinates 48°52.5291ʹS 123°23.5116ʹW: the “oceanic point of inaccessibility,” to use the formal name. It doesn’t get many visitors. But one morning last year, I met several people who had just come from there.

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