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 Chiropractic 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 Mrs. America pageant as Mrs. Kansas.^{[citation needed]}

She pursued a career as a health-care professional. After a 25 year marriage she divorced, quit her job and began a writing career.

Her first novel, Mutant Message Down Under, was published as a true story about her experiences during a walkabout with a group of Aboriginal Australians.

The novel became an immense success, in all countries but Australia, with an eventual sale of over 250,000 copies. After first self publishing it, she sold the rights of her novel to Harper Collins Publishers for $1.7 million in 1994.

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

After United Artists bought the rights to the novel, Aboriginal protests, which had been going on in Australia almost since the first appearance of the book, went so far that 8 elders came to the US in January 1996 to block the making of the movie. The delegation of elder respresentatives, led by Robert Eggington, the coordinator of the Dumbartung Aboriginal Corporation and a Noongah man from the southwest of Western Australia, was successful in blocking the film.^{[citation needed]}

On a meeting with these elders, Marlo Morgan finally admitted that the novel was a work of fiction.^{[citation needed]} New editions of the novel have therefore been published as a work of fiction.

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.

Although she had already admitted to never having lived with an Aboriginal tribe, she still continued to remain very unclear about that fact in her speeches. She claimed for her second book that "this time I was really asked by Aboriginal friends to please do this". There is no proof for this claim, and Aboriginal organisations have been outraged by her second book as well for the wrong picture it paints of their culture.