Lee Israel, a noted author and literary forger, passed away on December 24th, 2014 at age 75. She was best known for her biographies of famous figures such as Tallulah Bankhead, Dorothy Kilgallen and Estée Lauder. After growing up in the Bronx, Israel attended the Fashion Institute of Technology. Her career as an author began when she wrote for New York periodicals including the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, and Cosmopolitan. Her first full collection of essays, From Fellini to Formica: Offbeat Voyages Through a Film-Crazed Italy, was published in 1986. In the early 1990s, she resorted to literary forgery in order to make a living. Working with the help of accomplices, she wrote and sold letters of notable literary figures such as Louise Brooks and Noël Coward, often making the pieces more salacious than they actually were in real life. She penned an autobiography about her experiences with forgery titled, Can You Ever Forgive Me? Memoirs of a Literary Forger, which was published in 2008. Israel is remembered by her friends and colleagues as a objective observer, struck by the beauty of a moment of human contact, and as a determined and passionate biographer. Throughout her career, she sought to capture the emotion and expression of those she wrote about, making her work even more special.