Cassie Edwards Also Relied Upon Pulitzer-Winning Fiction

Over the weekend, the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books blog published additional evidence bestselling romance novelist Cassie Edwards may be a serial plagiarist, as one of the blog’s readers compiled similarities between Edwards’s Savage Dream, a Navajo-themed romance published in 1990, and Oliver La Farge‘s Laughing Boy: A Navajo Love Story, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (later made into a movie with Ramon Navarro and Lupe Velez).

“This, in my opinion, drives the sheer wrongness of what happened to new heights,” says the blog’s co-proprietor, Candy Tan. “Using passages, word-for-word, of research material still isn’t a good thing by a long shot, but I can understand somebody being confused about the protocols of how much to acknowledge in a work of fiction. Using descriptive passages from another work of fiction, however, changes the tenor entirely.”

The usual chart juxtaposing Edwards’ prose with that of her likely source material is provided.

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