I’m sure most “readers” do it. When you’re flipping through a magazine or newspaper and see a bookcase in the background of a photograph, you look closely to see if you can read any of the titles on the shelves.
It was the Roger Lea MacBride “The Rose Years” books in the photograph that caught my eye before the story itself; I’d know those spines anywhere. Only, as everyone ought to know by now, the Rose books weren’t written by Roger Lea MacBride; they were ghostwritten by R. Foster Winans.
Fortune magazine, April 16, 2007, page 102: “Where Are They Now?”
R. Foster Winans, 58
Wall Street Journal
Years before Martha Stewart, Foster Winans was the public face of insider trading. As co-author of the Wall Street Journal’s influential Heard on the Street column in the early 1980s, he sometimes told stockbroker Peter Brant and others what he was going to write, allowing them to get a jump on ordinary readers and the market. Winan’s tips made his co-conspirators almost $1 million. His cut was only $31,000. He served about eight months in prison and paid a $5,000 fine. A few years after getting out of jail, he moved back to his homestown of Doylestown, Pa., and began ghostwriting books – sometimes up to eight a year… (article by Barney Gimbel, only a portion of the full-page photograph in the scan above)
The dedication in the final “Rose” book, Bachelor Girl (published in 1999), reads: To Foster Winans, builder of his own little house, with profound gratitude and respect
Who do you suppose wrote the dedication?
