Harvard student novelist accused of plagiarism (Independent)
Posted by Bobby Kuechenmeister on April 24, 2006 
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Comments(0) The charge against the novel by Kaavya Viswanathan, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, was led yesterday by the Harvard campus newspaper, The Crimson.
Written when Ms Viswanathan was still in high school in New Jersey, the novel earned her a $500,000 (£280,000) two-book contract and a film deal with DreamWorks. Largely thanks to lavish media coverage of her precocious success, the book has shot up the New York Times bestseller list. It was number 32 in the hardcover fiction list last week.
Yesterday, however, the Harvard Crimson published strikingly similar passages from the new book and from the 2001 novel Sloppy Firsts, by Megan McCafferty, which is about teenage life in New Jersey.
category: Popular Culture