Marlo Morgan

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Marlo Morgan (born September 1937) is the author of the controversial metaphysical international best selling book Mutant Message Down Under.

[edit] Career

Marlo Morgan was born in Iowa in September 1937. She attended St. Agnes High School and then , Barstow Community College, University of Missouri, and Cleveland College where she earned doctorate degrees in the fields of biochemistry and oriental medicine. She moved to Kansas City, Missouri where married and had two children. During this time, she entered the Miss America pageant as Miss Kansas.^{[citation needed]}

She pursued a career as a health-care professional that led her to Australia to work in preventative health.

After a 25 year marriege she divorced, quit her job and began a writing career.

Her first novel, Mutant Message Downunder, began as extensive notes on the adventures she experienced during her four-months in Australia. Upon returning to the US, she assembled the notes based on her experiences with an Aborigine tribe so that she would be able to pass the knowledge she had gleaned from their lifestyle down to her grandchildren.

When asked to give lectures on her experiences that she considered writing a novel from her research. She struggled to find a publisher and eventually self published with help from her children in 1991.

The self published novel became an immediate success, with an eventual sale of over 250,000 copies. In 1994 she sold the rights of her novel to Harper Collins Publishers for $1.7 million. The United Artist Film Company bought the rights to the novel which is still holds although no film was made. The book was also a Literary Guild Special Release when first published by Harper Collins.

The novel was on the New York Times bestseller list for thirty-one consecutive weeks and was published in twenty-four countries. The work was chosen to be the 1995 American Booksellers Book of the Year and the alternate for the Doubleday Book Club.

She continues to give lectures concerning the plight of the Aborigines.

Following the success of her first novel, Morgan consequently published another work called Message From Forever in 1998. She has proposed a further sequel called The Last Farewell.

[edit] The book

Published in 1994, the book recounts the spiritual awakening that occurred to her during a "walkabout" she undertook with a group of Aboriginal Australians. During their travels, the Aboriginals, (who in the book prefer the name "Real People") taught this strange white woman (Mutant) how to not only survive while on foot in the outback, but to treat each and every thing as part of a whole, including one's own self. Mutant Message Down Under asserts that their seemingly primitive way of life lends to them powers unheard of in Western society, including telepathy, water finding skills, communication with animals and plants, vanishing into thin air (or seeming to), and making one person seem like ten, or a hundred^{[citation needed]}.

The book was not published in Australia, which was probably due to the fact that the ways and beliefs of the tribe Morgan claimed to have walked with were very unfamiliar to the Australian Aboriginals. When a Hollywood film based on the book was about to be made, Morgan was confronted by Australian Aboriginal elders in 1996. Marlo Morgan then had to admit that she had in fact invented the whole story. There was no such tribe; there was no walk across Australia.