Janet Cooke is back in the news. Ms. Cooke won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for a series of columns in the Washington Post about a tragic eight-year-old heroin addict named Jimmy. It was later discovered that "Jimmy" did not exist and that the whole story was fabricated. After Cooke was drummed out of journalism and her prize revoked, she spent some time living in Paris, then turned up at a $6.15-an-hour department-store clerk job in Kalamazoo, Michigan. It was in an interview there that Cooke told GQ magazine that her tendency to tell tall tales developed as a defensive measure against a stern, ill-tempered stepfather. She has since sold the film rights to her life story for $700,000.

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