American writer Lee Israel was BOTD in 1939. Born in New York City to a middle-class Jewish family, she graduated from CUNY Brooklyn College and became a freelance writer. She established her reputation with a profile of Katharine Hepburn for Esquire magazine, published just after the death of Hepburn’s companion Spencer Tracy, and published biographies of actress Tallulah Bankhead and cosmetics tycoon Estée Lauder. In the 1990s, short of money and unemployable, she supported herself through literary forgery, producing hundreds of fake letters purporting to be written by literary lions including Dorothy Parker, Noël Coward, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O’Neill, Humphrey Bogart and Louise Brooks, several of which ended up in library collections and official biographies. After being blacklisted by local bookstores, she employed her gay friend Jack Hock to sell letters on her behalf. Busted in 1993, she pled guilty to conspiracy to transport stolen property, serving six months of house arrest and five years of probation. Banned from most libraries and archives, she supported herself by copywriting until the surprise success of her 2008 memoir Can You Ever Forgive Me?, cheerfully chronicling her life of crime. Openly gay since forever, famously misanthropic, serially alcoholic and terminally single, she died in 2014 aged 75. She was played by Melissa McCarthy in the 2018 biopic Can You Ever Forgive Me?, adapted from her memoir.