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Every Great Writer Is a Thief — And Here's the Proof

Here's an uncomfortable truth the literary establishment doesn't want to discuss at cocktail parties: virtually every beloved classic you've ever read was, in some measurable way, stolen. Not borrowed. Not "inspired by." Stolen. Before you clutch your pearls and defend your favorite author's honor, let me walk you through a rogues' gallery of literary larceny that would make a pickpocket blush.

Shakespeare — yes, the Bard himself, the untouchable god of English letters — was one of the most prolific plot thieves in history. "Romeo and Juliet"? Lifted almost wholesale from Arthur Brooke's 1562 poem "The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet." "The Merchant of Venice"? Borrowed from Giovanni Fiorentino's "Il Pecorone," written in 1378. "King Lear"? Based on Geoffrey of Monmouth's "Historia Regum Britanniae" from the twelfth century. Out of Shakespeare's 37 plays, scholars estimate that only two or three have plots that can be called genuinely original. Two or three! The man we consider the greatest writer in the English language was essentially running a remix operation. And nobody cares. Why? Because he did it better than anyone else.

Now let's fast-forward to the nineteenth century, where things get truly spicy. In 1847, Charlotte Brontë published "Jane Eyre." But critics have long noted the structural similarities between "Jane Eyre" and Samuel Richardson's "Pamela" (1740). Governess falls for brooding master, endures moral trials, eventually wins his love and respect. Sound familiar? Richardson did it a century earlier, minus the mad wife in the attic. Brontë added the Gothic twist, and suddenly it's a masterpiece. Was it plagiarism? Of course not. It was genius-level renovation.

But let's talk about actual, documented, no-ambiguity-about-it borrowing. H.G. Wells published "The Time Machine" in 1895 and became the father of time travel fiction. Except he wasn't. In 1881, fourteen years earlier, Edward Page Mitchell published "The Clock That Went Backward" in the New York Sun. An even earlier example: the Spanish playwright Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau wrote "El Anacronópete" in 1887 — a novel about a time-traveling machine. Wells never credited either work. Did he read them? We'll never know for certain, but the literary world collectively shrugged and handed Wells the crown anyway.

Here's where the line between plagiarism and inspiration gets philosophically interesting. In 1922, James Joyce published "Ulysses," widely considered the greatest novel of the twentieth century. Its entire structure is a deliberate, openly acknowledged retelling of Homer's "Odyssey." Joyce didn't hide it — the title is literally the Latin name for Odysseus. He took a 2,800-year-old plot and set it in a single day in Dublin. Nobody called it plagiarism. They called it modernism. So the rule seems to be: steal from something old enough, and it's called homage. Steal from something recent, and it's called a lawsuit.

And lawsuits there have been. In 2006, Dan Brown faced a plagiarism trial in London's High Court. Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh claimed Brown's mega-bestseller "The Da Vinci Code" stole the central thesis from their 1982 nonfiction book "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" — namely, that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and their bloodline survives. Brown won the case, and the judge's reasoning was delicious: you can't copyright an idea, only the expression of it. Baigent and Leigh presented their thesis as historical fact; Brown turned it into a thriller. Different expression. Case dismissed. But the irony was thick enough to cut with a knife: a book about hidden secrets was built on someone else's research, and the law said that was perfectly fine.

The twentieth century is absolutely riddled with these echo chambers. Aldous Huxley published "Brave New World" in 1932. Yevgeny Zamyatin published "We" in 1924 — a dystopia about a totalitarian state controlling citizens through pleasure, surveillance, and the suppression of individuality. George Orwell published "1984" in 1949 and openly admitted he was influenced by Zamyatin. Huxley claimed he'd never read "We," though Orwell didn't believe him. So here we have three of the most important dystopian novels ever written, and they're all essentially variations on the same paranoid nightmare. The Russian wrote it first, the Brit who admitted it gets credit for honesty, and the other Brit who denied it gets taught in every high school on Earth.

Let's get even more uncomfortable. J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" — orphan boy discovers he has magical powers, attends a school for wizards, battles an evil dark lord. Sound unique? Now read Ursula K. Le Guin's "A Wizard of Earthsea" from 1968: orphan boy discovers he has magical powers, attends a school for wizards, battles a dark shadow. Or Neil Gaiman's "The Books of Magic" from 1990: a bespectacled dark-haired English boy learns he's destined to be the world's most powerful magician. Gaiman himself has said he doesn't think Rowling plagiarized him, noting that both drew from the same deep well of archetypes. And that's the crux of it, isn't it? At some point, with only so many basic plots available — some scholars say seven, others say thirty-six, Christopher Booker famously argued for just seven — every writer is inevitably going to bump elbows with someone who came before.

The French have a wonderfully cynical phrase for this: "Il n'y a rien de nouveau sous le soleil" — there is nothing new under the sun. And they stole it from the Book of Ecclesiastes. The Italian writer Umberto Eco put it more precisely: "Books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told." Eco practiced what he preached — his novel "The Name of the Rose" is essentially a Sherlock Holmes mystery set in a fourteenth-century monastery, and he was completely transparent about it.

So where does this leave us? If Shakespeare stole, and Joyce stole, and Orwell stole, and everyone in between stole — is originality just a myth we tell aspiring writers to keep them buying creative writing courses? Not quite. The difference between plagiarism and inspiration isn't about the plot. It never was. It's about transformation. A plagiarist copies. An artist metabolizes. Shakespeare took Brooke's clunky poem and alchemized it into the most famous love story ever told. Joyce took Homer and reinvented the novel. Rowling took a wizard school and built a billion-dollar universe that made an entire generation fall in love with reading.

The uncomfortable truth — the one that keeps literary critics employed and copyright lawyers fed — is that every story is a conversation with every story that came before it. The question isn't whether you borrowed. The question is whether you had the decency, the talent, and the sheer audacity to make something new out of what you took. Because if literature has taught us one thing, it's this: steal brilliantly, and they'll build statues in your honor. Steal badly, and they'll bury you in footnotes.