John Heidenry is an author and editor who was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He is the former editor of St. Louis magazine and the founder of the St. Louis Literary Supplement. He is also the former editor of Penthouse Forum, the former interim editor of Maxim magazine, and the former executive editor of The Week. Heidenry is the author of Theirs Was The Kingdom: Lila and DeWitt Wallace & the Story of the Reader's Digest (W W Norton, 1993), What Wild Ecstasy: The Rise and Fall of the Sexual Revolution (Simon & Schuster, 1997), The Gashouse Gang: How Dizzy Dean, Leo Durocher, Branch Rickey, Pepper Martin, and Their Colorful, Come-from-Behind Ball Club Won the World Series-and America's Heart-During the Great Depression (Public Affairs, 2007), Zero at the Bone: The Playboy, the Prostitute, and the Murder of Bobby Greenlease (St. Martin's Press, 2009), and the co-author, with Brett Topel, of The Boys Who Were Left Behind: The 1944 World Series between the Hapless St. Louis Browns and the Legendary St. Louis Cardinals (University of Nebraska Press, 2006).

According to the New York Times, Heidenry was accused by Philip Nobile

Philip Nobile

Philip Nobile is an American freelance writer, historian, and social critic/commentator based in New York City.Nobile's original career was not that of a journalist, but of a seminarian; however, he left religious life to become a journalist...

, his former coworker at Penthouse Forum, of plagiarizing

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...

parts of What Wild Ecstasy. The accusation raised the question of whether ordinary, workaday prose, rather than "unique expression," can be plagiarized.

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