In 1892, deaf and blind Helen Keller was accused of plagiarizing Margaret Canby’s “Frost Fairies” with her short story, “The Frost King.”
After being acquitted, Mark Twain wrote her a letter of support.
“… Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that “plagiarism” farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism!
The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism.
For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources …”
– Mark Twain
When I read this I thought of the wedding photographer who accused me of plagerism; not of his work but of his pricing.
I want to thank him for teaching me what I do not wish to be and for helping me find my “true north” as a photographer.
