The Great Impostor

The essential biography of the legendary con man who impersonated doctors, monks, and more—the basis for the classic film starring Tony Curtis.

Ferdinand Waldo Demara wanted to be a hero. Instead, he became many. After enlisting in the military in 1941, he went AWOL and assumed the identity of an army buddy. He soon found that with his sharp wit and uncanny memory, he could reinvent himself endlessly, impersonating professionals in various fields—and fooling the experts time and again.

During his storied career, Demara became a Trappist monk; a doctor of psychology and Dean of the School of Philosophy at a small college in Pennsylvania; a law student, zoology graduate, cancer researcher and teacher at a junior college in Maine; a surgeon-lieutenant in the Royal Canadian Navy (as medical officer on the destroyed Cayuga, he successfully performed major surgery); a brilliant assistant warden of a Texas prison; and a beloved teacher on an island in Maine.

In this forthright account of a remarkable fraud, Robert Crichton presents the man, his reasons, and his methods. A New York Times bestseller when it was originally published in 1959, and serving as the inspiration for the Tony Curtis film of the same name, this is the fascinating and disturbing story of America's Great Impostor.