Smith insisted that he did not compose the book but merely "translated" it under divine guidance.
To compose the book, she took the obscene tales of her clients as they were told in court documents and republished them, unaltered, as poetry.
It took Jones 20 years to compose the book, and the method he finally chose not only blended form (the epic poem and the novel), but also content: the text is strewn with fragments from Welsh dark ages poetry, pagan folklore, the Song of Roland, Chaucer, Malory, Shakespeare (Henry V especially), Milton, Coleridge, Browning, ancient ballads, rugby songs and Lewis Carroll's poetry.
After all, no one really knows who authored them (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John did not compose the books attributed to them), but historians do agree that the authors never met Jesus, never met anyone who met him, didn't speak the language of Jesus's land, most likely lived in another country, and wrote the gospels 40 to 70 years after Jesus's death, based on rumors that had been going around.
She wrote on blank newsprint and composed the book out of order, beginning with the last chapter and picking up other sections as her mood suited her.
Murray composed the book during his internment in a series of German POW camps between 1942 and 1945, after his capture at the Battle of Tobruk.
He composed the book by speaking into a recorder and then, with his co-author, Hugh Delehanty, turning that audio into a text that made some kind of sense on the page.
Yet Kaufman composed the book in an almost presciently postmodern style, largely assembling her story through an accretion of found objects: bureaucratic circulars, homework assignments, wastebasket contents, doodles, and interoffice memos among teachers.
The author is Vatsyayana, about whom virtually nothing is known, except that, in the words of the new translation, he writes that he composed the book "in chastity and in the highest meditation".
This is where he began composing the book that would become known as Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) – a compendium of poems on satanism, lesbianism, sex, death and revolt which would eventually be prosecuted on grounds of blasphemy on publication in 1857 (six of the poems remained banned until 1949).
Potter composed the book at Hill Top, a working farm in the Lake District she bought in 1905.
