American Notes Publishing

The saga of Forrest Carter's book is a publisher's dream. The Education of Little Tree, a sensitive memoir of Carter's Native American childhood, was published in hard-cover in 1976 to little fanfare. Released in softcover by the University of New Mexico Press this year, the book now tops the New York Times paperback best-seller list, with 600,000 copies in print.

But is the book a hoax? Yes, says Dan T. Carter, a history professor at Emory University. In an op-ed page piece in the New York Times last week, Carter charged that the late Forrest Carter was not a Cherokee at all. Instead, he was Asa Earl Carter, whom the professor describes as a "Ku Klux Klan terrorist, right-wing radio announcer, home-grown American fascist and anti-Semite."

The allegation that the novelist and the racist were one and the same was swiftly disputed by the author's executor and Asa Earl Carter's brother Doug. The latter did acknowledge that Asa wrote speeches for Alabama's George Wallace, including the infamous lines "Segregation now. Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever!" But old friends point out that Asa and Forrest Carter looked alike, used the same address and were the same age. Perhaps the book should be retitled The Mystery of Little Tree.