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

Here's a dirty little secret the literary world doesn't want you to think about too hard: your favorite novel is probably stolen. Not "inspired by." Not "a loving homage." Stolen. Lifted. Borrowed without a receipt. And the writer who did it? They're on your bookshelf right now, gilded spine and all, looking respectable.

Before you clutch your pearls, consider this — Shakespeare, the god of English literature himself, didn't invent a single one of his major plots. Not one. Romeo and Juliet? That's Arthur Brooke's poem "The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet" from 1562. Hamlet? Try a Scandinavian legend recycled through at least three other writers before Will got his quill on it. The Tempest, Othello, King Lear — all sourced from existing stories. If Shakespeare were alive today and posting on Wattpad, he'd be getting DMCA takedowns every Tuesday.

But here's where it gets interesting. Nobody calls Shakespeare a plagiarist. He's a genius who "transformed his sources." Meanwhile, when a lesser-known writer does the exact same thing, we call them a hack. Funny how that works, isn't it? The line between plagiarism and inspiration has never been about the borrowing itself — it's about how famous you are when you get caught.

Let's talk about one of the juiciest cases in literary history. In 2006, a nineteen-year-old Harvard student named Kaavya Viswanathan published "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life." Big deal, half-million-dollar advance, the whole circus. Then someone noticed that passages — entire paragraphs — were nearly identical to Megan McCafferty's "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings." Viswanathan claimed she had a "photographic memory" and must have "internalized" the passages. The book was pulled. Her career was over before it started. She was nineteen. Shakespeare stole entire plots and got a globe named after him.

Or take the bizarre saga of Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code." In 2006, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh sued Brown, claiming he'd stolen the central thesis of their 1982 non-fiction book "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail." The court ruled in Brown's favor, and here's the delicious irony — the judge actually embedded his own secret code in the ruling. But the real twist? Baigent and Leigh had themselves drawn heavily on earlier works about the Priory of Sion, which turned out to be based on forged documents planted in the Bibliothèque Nationale by a French con man named Pierre Plantard in the 1960s. Everyone was stealing from everyone, and the original source was a fraud. You can't make this stuff up. Well, apparently somebody did.

Now, the literary establishment has a convenient phrase for all this: "intertextuality." It sounds academic enough to make theft respectable. When T.S. Eliot wrote "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal," he wasn't being clever — he was writing his own defense brief. "The Waste Land" is basically a collage of other people's lines stitched together with footnotes. Eliot took from Dante, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Hindu scripture, and a dozen others. He called it a new form. Critics called it revolutionary. If a grad student turned it in today without the citations, they'd be expelled.

The fantasy genre is an absolute minefield. J.K. Rowling has been accused of borrowing from everything and everyone — Neil Gaiman's "Books of Magic" featured a dark-haired, bespectacled English boy who discovers he's destined for a world of magic years before Harry Potter arrived. Gaiman himself dismissed the comparison gracefully, noting they both drew from the same archetypal well. And he's right. But then there's the case of the estate of Adrian Jacobs, who wrote "Willy the Wizard" in 1987 — a story about a wizard who wins a contest and travels on a train. The lawsuit dragged on for years. The point isn't whether Rowling stole anything — it's that the same story keeps getting told, and whoever tells it loudest gets the credit.

Here's one that'll really cook your noodle. Alexandre Dumas, the man behind "The Three Musketeers" and "The Count of Monte Cristo," employed a factory of ghostwriters. His most prolific collaborator, Auguste Maquet, wrote substantial portions of many novels published under Dumas's name. Maquet sued and won partial credit, but history remembers Dumas. Maquet is a footnote. So who plagiarized whom? Or is it even plagiarism when the stolen goods have someone else's name on the contract?

The truth is, there are only so many stories. Christopher Booker argued there are exactly seven basic plots. Others say three. Joseph Campbell boiled the hero's journey down to a single monomyth. If every story is a variation on a handful of templates, then "originality" is really just the distance between you and the last person who told the same story. Far enough apart and you're a visionary. Too close and you're in court.

What really separates plagiarism from inspiration isn't the borrowing — it's the transformation. West Side Story is Romeo and Juliet on the streets of New York, and nobody sued Arthur Laurents. "Bridget Jones's Diary" is openly, cheerfully Pride and Prejudice in a London flat with too much Chardonnay, and Helen Fielding gets praise for her wit, not a cease-and-desist from Austen's estate. The trick isn't to avoid stealing — it's to steal so well that you make the stolen thing entirely your own.

But let's not be too romantic about it. There's a real difference between creative borrowing and lazy copy-paste. When Alex Haley's "Roots" was found to contain passages lifted almost verbatim from Harold Courlander's "The African," Haley settled out of court for $650,000 — in 1978 dollars. That's not intertextuality. That's a Xerox machine with delusions of grandeur. The line exists. It's just blurrier than we'd like to admit.

So the next time someone accuses your favorite author of plagiarism, don't panic. Ask yourself: did they take something and make it better, weirder, more alive? Did they transform the borrowed clay into something new? If yes, congratulations — they're not a plagiarist. They're a writer. Because every story is built on the bones of the story that came before it. The only truly original writer is the one nobody wants to read.

And if that bothers you, take it up with Shakespeare. He started it.