The most immediate examples that came to mind were, of course, James Frey, the author of the best-selling “Million Little Pieces,” in which he embellished details of his experiences as a drug addict, and J T LeRoy, the novelist thought to be a young West Virginia male prostitute who was actually the fictive alter ego of Laura Albert, a woman now living in San Francisco.

But the history of literary fakers stretches far, far back, at least to the 19th century, when a slave narrative published in 1863 by Archy Moore was revealed as a novel written by a white historian, Richard Hildreth, and into the early 20th, when Joan Lowell wrote a popular autobiography, “Cradle of the Deep,” about her colorful childhood aboard a four-masted ship sailing the South Seas; in fact, she had grown up almost entirely in Berkeley, Calif.

In a telephone interview from Paris, where she said she was attending a party in conjunction with the showing of a television interview, Ms. Albert was intermittently tearful, full of rage and expressing compassion for the other recently unmasked hoaxers. She said that she was not sorry and that since she published her work as fiction, she had done nothing wrong.

The family grieved. A few years later Patricia’s mother re-married. Her new husband was a widower with six children of his own. Their families merged. Suddenly, Patty became the youngest of a dozen siblings.

She lost her father at such a young age she could barely remember him. She wanted to know about him. What was he like? Her family talked about Howard. Through their stories Patty was able to imagine him.

Kambitsch’s quest to know her dad led her to write a book, “Looks Like Howard — An Irreverent Memoir of Death, Childhood, and Growing Up.” She explains that “he really represents storytelling to me.” Because she only knew him through the stories her family told about him, “he became not just a father, but a mythological creature.”

“Looks Like Howard” opens with the line, “As long as I’ve known Howard, he’s been dead.” This is our first inkling that this book is something special. Kambitsch describes some serious events; accidental death, suicide, divorce — but she has such a light touch throughout that even sad moments twinkle with wry humor.

Kambitsch writes with the neurotic wackiness of an Anne Lamott. She has a droll wit that reminded me of Anna Quindlen. Kambitsch is the real deal.

The book shifts backwards and forwards in time as childhood memories are juxtaposed with visits to her therapist. His name is also Howard. That name is so special to her that “I Google Howard. I’m not looking for any Howard in particular, just Howard. I know it seems childish, but I get a thrill seeing the phrase ‘searching for Howard’ in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.”

Their next door neighbor, a Mr. Wilson, was in the fishing boat with her dad when the accident happened. Throughout the course of the book she fights the urge to confront Wilson to ask him what really happened that day. He still lives next door.

She wants to ask him because “as far as I know, no one I knew, not even my mother, asked Mr. Wilson about the details.” Every day they see Mr. Wilson yet “no one dared ask why it was that no one asked.” That’s where her family of storytellers chimes in. “The children of Howard never needed to ask because each of us tells our own story about what happened.” Her desire to solve the mystery of Howard leads to flights of fancy.

The book rises up and clamps right down on our funnybones. “Anything could have happened to Howard. Alien abduction, cyborg mutation, an ill-fated love polygon involving Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedy brothers…” She means anything; “maybe Howard was stricken with amnesia, turned gay, and wandered off to SoHo to write poetry and smoke his pipe with Allen Ginsberg.”

Meanwhile, her therapist is dipping into the wellspring of her anguish. He asks her “what makes you so afraid?” She enumerates some of her fears. She realizes that ” I’m afraid that I’m just a big weirdo and that there’s nothing special about me. I’m afraid of pain. I’m afraid that my children won’t have a world fit for raising their children. I’m afraid of all the different ways the world is ending and I’ll be the last human being left alive. I’m afraid of overpopulation.”

“Looks Like Howard” defies the current depressing vogue in memoir. Kambitsch challenges that stereotype; “we all carry our stories around with us - why not tell the one that is the most fun?”

Margaret Seltzer, who wrote under the pseudonym Margaret B. Jones, referred to the International Brother/SisterHood in the author biography that appeared on the back flap of the book. The memoir was published by Riverhead Books, a unit of Penguin Group USA, and released last Thursday. With help from her agent, Faye Bender, Ms. Seltzer also set up a Web site, brothersisterhood.com, in October to describe the foundation and promote her book. Since the revelations about the book, however, Ms. Bender has taken down the Web site.

No record of the foundation could be found with the Internal Revenue Service or the states of Oregon, where Ms. Seltzer lives, or California.

Ms. Bender said she helped set up Ms. Seltzer’s foundation Web site because the author said she lacked money to buy Internet server space. “She explained several times that it was a budding organization,” Ms. Bender said. “She said that the people involved were gang members and they were working to help other gang members and help other kids not get into gangs.” Ms. Bender said she asked no further questions, but added that Ms. Seltzer did not solicit funds on the site.

Ms. Seltzer’s cellphone was not taking messages on Wednesday, and she did not return an e-mail message or a message left with Ms. Bender. But in a telephone interview on Monday, Ms. Seltzer said she met many gang members and their families through her activism. “You meet one person, you meet their friends, you meet their family and that’s your friends,” she said. “All I can say is it’s a very, very small world.”

Leaders of several other groups combating gang violence in Los Angeles who were listed on Ms. Seltzer’s Web site said they did not know of the International Brother/SisterHood or of Ms. Seltzer or Margaret B. Jones.

“I’ve never heard of her before in my life,” said Malik Spellman, an intervention prevention specialist at Unity T.W.O., which works to provide social services and stop gang activity in many South-Central Los Angeles neighborhoods and was listed on Ms. Seltzer’s site. “I believe if she was active, I would probably know her by name or the organization.”

Ms. Seltzer claimed in the book to be part American Indian and said she grew up with an African-American foster family in South-Central Los Angeles running drugs for the Bloods. In fact she has no such heritage and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of suburban Los Angeles with her biological family and graduated from a private Episcopal day school.

Khalid Shah, executive director of Stop the Violence, Increase the Peace Foundation, another organization listed by Ms. Seltzer, said he had not heard of Ms. Seltzer or her foundation. “She’s been doing her homework if she has all those organizations listed,” he said. “She must know something about something, or has done a lot of reading. It’s easy to get a lot of stuff off the Internet.”

Constance L. Rice, a co-director of the Los Angeles office of Advancement Project, a civil rights advocacy group, who wrote a report last year about reducing gang violence for the Los Angeles City Council, said that there were 50,000 to 80,000 gang members in Los Angeles County, and it was always possible that Ms. Seltzer worked with some of them. But Ms. Rice said that she did not know Ms. Seltzer or her foundation and noted that, as a white woman, Ms. Seltzer would have likely stood out in most neighborhoods of South-Central Los Angeles.

Ms. Rice said it was just as likely that Ms. Seltzer had taken her inspiration from television and movies. “She’s been watching too much of ‘The Shield,’ ” said Ms. Rice, referring to the rough-edged police drama on FX set in Los Angeles. “All you have to do is go to a couple of movies or watch ‘The Wire,’ ” the Baltimore street drama on HBO. “You could riff off that forever,” she said.

Ms. Seltzer said on Monday that although she fabricated the personal story, many of the incidents in the memoir were based on experiences of friends in the gang world.

Geoffrey Kloske, publisher of Riverhead, said that all he knew about the foundation was the wording that Ms. Seltzer asked to include on the book jacket. The publisher agreed to do so, no questions asked.”

Installing electrical wiring.

Trick shooting.

Piloting a commercial airliner.

Clinton’s legal agent declined the option of reviewing and releasing the documents that were withheld, said the archivists, who work for the federal government, not the Clintons.

The decision to withhold the records could provide fodder for critics who say that the former president and his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, now seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, have been unwilling to fully release documents to public scrutiny.

Officials with the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., criticized Hillary Clinton this week for not doing more to see that records from her husband’s administration are made public. “She’s been reluctant to disclose information,” Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, told reporters in a conference call in which he specifically cited the slow release records from the Clinton library. “If she’s not willing to be open with (voters) on these issues now, why would she be open as president?”

In January 2006, USA TODAY requested documents about the pardons under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The library made 4,000 pages available this week. However, 1,500 pages were either partially redacted or withheld entirely, including 300 pages covering internal White House communications on pardon decisions, such as memos to and from the president, and reports on which pardon requests the Justice Department opposed.

In a statement, the Clinton campaign said that “all of the redactions made to the pardon-related documents were made by (the National Archives).”

Former president Clinton issued 140 pardons on his last day in office, including several to controversial figures, such as commodities trader Rich, then a fugitive on tax evasion charges. Rich’s ex-wife, Denise, contributed $2,000 in 1999 to Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign; $5,000 to a related political action committee; and $450,000 to a fund set up to build the Clinton library.

The president also pardoned two men who each paid Sen. Clinton’s brother, Hugh Rodham, about $200,000 to lobby the White House for pardons — one for a drug conviction and one for mail fraud and perjury convictions, according to a 2002 report by the House committee on government reform. After the payments came to light, Bill Clinton issued a statement: “Neither Hillary nor I had any knowledge of such payments,” the report said.

The pardon records released by the library divulge little that might settle debate about those and other pardons. But they do shed new light on the volume of clemency requests that former president Clinton received — and the pressures he and his staff faced as friends, advisers, political leaders and foreign heads of state weighed in to influence which petitions would be granted.

The files contain handwritten letters from several of the president’s close associates. Former Democratic Party chairman Donald Fowler of South Carolina wrote a note seeking clemency for former congressman John Jenrette, D-S.C., who was convicted in the 1980 Abscam sting in which FBI agents, posing as Middle Eastern businessmen, offered lawmakers bribes for political favors. Clinton did not grant the pardon.

Most of the withheld documents, including dozens of clemency pleas sent to the president, were blocked from release under FOIA rules that protect personal privacy. The 300 pages of internal White House documents on pardon requests were blocked under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which allows presidents to maintain the confidentiality of communications with their advisers for up to 12 years after they leave office.

In 2002, Clinton sent a guidance letter to his library that urged quick release of most White House records but retained the confidentiality prerogative covering advice from his staff. Still, Clinton said the restriction should be interpreted “narrowly” and allowed that certain records detailing internal communications could be made public if reviewed and approved for release by his designated legal agent.

Emily Robison, the library’s deputy director, said Clinton’s agent, former deputy White House counsel Bruce Lindsey, chose not to review the withheld documents.

Lindsey “was given the opportunity to look at what we withheld under the (president’s) guidelines, and he chose not to. … Only Mr. Lindsey and the president have the authority to open those,” she said.

The William J. Clinton Foundation, which Lindsey helps oversee, said in a written statement that the National Archives is responsible for deciding which records are withheld under the Presidential Records Act. Archivists were exclusively responsible for “determinations with respect to these materials,” the statement said.

Clinton’s guidance to the library goes beyond his predecessors, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, in urging that most of his presidential records be released quickly, according to Tom Blanton of the National Security Archive, a research institute at George Washington University that collects government records for public use.

Blanton noted that Lindsey’s refusal to review the withheld documents could be viewed as an effort to ensure the archivists’ independence. “He’s saying the professional archivists get to make this determination; it’s not a political determination.”

The archivists’ decision to withhold records that could be construed as confidential communications between Clinton and his advisers is more consistent with the Bush administration’s hard line on the release of White House records, Blanton said.

President Bush signed an order in November 2001 that broadened former presidents’ prerogative to block the release of internal White House records. That order, which Bill Clinton opposed, also allows a president’s immediate family to assert the privilege.

In 2004, Judicial Watch, a conservative public interest group, went to court to force the Bush administration to release Justice Department records on Clinton’s pardons, and a federal judge ordered that the records be opened. But the administration, which argued that such releases would undermine a president’s ability to get confidential advice, blacked out most of the documents it made public.

The problem is that none of that is true.

Ms. Jones, a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, actually is all white and grew up in Sherman Oaks, in the San Fernando Valley of California, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in North Hollywood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. She is still a few credits short of a diploma from University of Oregon.

Riverhead Books, the unit of Penguin Group USA that published “Love and Consequences,” is recalling all copies of the book and has canceled Ms. Seltzer’s book tour, which was scheduled to start on Monday in Eugene, Ore., where she currently lives.

In a sometimes tearful, often contrite telephone interview from her home on Monday, Ms. Seltzer, 33, who is known as Peggy, admitted that the personal story she tells in the book was entirely fabricated. She insisted, though, that many of the details in the book were based on the experiences of close friends she had met over the years while working to reduce gang violence in Los Angeles.

“For whatever reason, I was really torn and I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to,” Ms. Seltzer said. “I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk. Maybe it’s an ego thing I don’t know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it.”

Ms. Seltzer’s story started unraveling last Thursday after she was profiled in the House & Home section of The New York Times. The article appeared alongside a photograph of Ms. Seltzer (still using her pseudonym) and her 8-year-old daughter, Rya. Ms. Seltzer’s older sister, Cynthia Seltzer Hoffman, saw the piece and called Riverhead to tell them that Ms. Seltzer’s story was untrue.

“Love and Consequences” immediately hit a note with many reviewers. Writing in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani praised the “humane and deeply affecting memoir,” but noted that some of the scenes “can feel self-consciously novelistic at times.” In Entertainment Weekly, Vanessa Juarez wrote that “readers may wonder if Jones embellishes the dialogue” but went on to extol the “powerful story of resilience and unconditional love.”

Sarah McGrath, the editor at Riverhead who worked with Ms. Seltzer for three years on the book, said she was stunned to discover that the author had lied. “It’s very upsetting to us because we spent so much time with this person and we felt such sympathy for her and she would talk about how she didn’t have any money or any heat and we completely bought into that and thought we were doing something good by bringing her story to light,” Ms. McGrath said. “I continue to feel deeply sad about what’s happened here, but there’s a huge personal betrayal here as well as a professional one.”

Ms. Seltzer said she had been writing about her friends’ experiences for years in creative writing classes and on her own before a professor asked her to speak with Inga Muscio, an author who was then working on a book about racism. Ms. Seltzer talked about what she portrayed as her experiences and Ms. Muscio used some of those accounts in her book. Ms. Muscio then referred Ms. Seltzer to her agent, Faye Bender, who read some pages that Ms. Seltzer had written and encouraged the young author to write more.

In April 2005, Ms. Bender submitted about 100 pages to four publishers. Ms. McGrath, then at Scribner, a unit of Simon & Schuster, agreed to a deal for what she said was under $100,000. When Ms. McGrath moved to Riverhead in 2006, she moved Ms. Seltzer’s contract.

Over the course of three years, Ms. McGrath, who is the daughter of Charles McGrath, a writer at large at The New York Times, worked closely with Ms. Seltzer on the book. “I’ve been talking to her on the phone and getting e-mails from her for three years and her story never has changed,” Ms. McGrath said. “All the details have been the same. There never have been any cracks.”

Ms. Seltzer said she had met some gang members during a short stint she said she spent at “Grant” high school “in the Valley.” (A Google search identifies Ulysses S. Grant High School, a school on 34 acres in the Valley Glen neighborhood in the east central San Fernando Valley.) “It opened my mind to the fact that not everybody is as they are portrayed on the news,” she said. “Everything’s not that black and white or gray or brown.”

She said that although she returned to Campbell Hall to graduate, she remained in touch with people she met at Grant and then began working with advocacy groups that were trying to stop gang violence. She said that even after she moved to Oregon to attend college, she would often venture to South Central Los Angeles to spend time with friends in the gang world.

In the book, she describes her foster mother, Big Mom, an African-American woman who raised four grandchildren, and a foster brother, Terrell, who was gunned down by members of the Crips right outside her foster mother’s home.

Ms. Seltzer, who writes in an author’s note to the book that she “combined characters and changed names, dates, and places,” said that these characters and incidents were in part based on friends’ experiences. “I had a couple of friends who had moms who were like my mom and that’s where Big Mom comes from — from being in the house all the time and watching what goes on. One of my best friend’s little brother was killed two years ago, shot,” she said.

Ms. Seltzer added that she wrote the book “sitting at the Starbucks at the corner of Crenshaw and Stockyard. People would come in and say, ‘What are you doing?’ because I would be sitting there all day every day. I would talk to kids who were Black Panthers and kids who were gang members and kids who were not gang members.”

Now she’s O-for-two.

A second memoir hailed by Oprah Winfrey’s media empire was exposed as a fraud when author Margaret B. Jones - who claimed to be a biracial gang-banger - was revealed as Margaret Seltzer, a well-to-do San Fernando Valley girl.

“Love and Consequences” was published last week to generally rave reviews - and on her MySpace page, Jones/Seltzer trumpeted the plug from O, The Oprah Magazine.

A “startlingly tender memoir,” read the enthusiastic blurb.

Uh-O!

Publisher Riverhead Books was forced to recall 19,000 copies of the book yesterday after Seltzer admitted her gripping tale of running drugs for a South Central Los Angeles gang was a work of fiction.

“Riverhead is saddened by this turn of events,” the publisher said in a statement. “We feel bad for our readers, Peggy and her family.”

Oprah’s magazine also backed off its praise. “While it was a great read, we now know that it should have been classified as fiction, rather than as a memoir, said Amy Gross, editor in chief.

“Love and Consequences” was the second memoir revealed as a hoax in the past week - the first came when author Misha Defonseca acknowledged that her 1997 book “Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years” was a fake.

More memorably, author James Frey received a nationally broadcast, verbal spanking from Winfrey two years ago after admitting he invented or exaggerated sections of his best-selling memoir, “A Million Little Pieces.”

Winfrey selected Frey’s autobiography for her Oprah Book Club audience.

Seltzer, 33, was exposed by her sister, who read a profile of the author last week in The New York Times and then contacted the paper. The Times confronted Seltzer, who was tearful and contrite in admitting the deception.

Riverhead Books canceled a planned book tour for Seltzer. The publisher will offer refunds for anyone who bought the book.

The MySpace page set up by the author was yanked, and the voicemail box at her Oregon home was filled yesterday.

The latest scandal came despite the efforts of Seltzer’s editors, who fact-checked the story. Riverhead said Seltzer’s duplicity included bogus photos, letters and even fake foster siblings, whom she produced to verify her story.

The hoax demonstrates the difficulty publishers face in separating truth from fiction in memoirs.

“One cannot protect oneself 100% from a dedicated hoaxster any more than one can protect oneself 100% from a dedicated terrorist,” said Sara Nelson, editor in chief of Publishers Weekly.

“It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep. But there’s a phone in the White House, and it’s ringing,” Clinton’s ad begins.

McCain, a four-term senator from Arizona, said he is the most experienced and qualified to respond in that situation.

“I would believe that my knowledge and experience and background clearly indicates that if the phone rang at 3 a.m. in the White House, and I was the one to answer it, I would be the one most qualified to exercise the kind of judgment necessary to address a national security crisis,” McCain told reporters Monday in Phoenix.

He opened a news conference in an airplane hangar by reeling off international events that concern him, including the Russian election of Vladimir Putin’s hand-picked successor, several days of bombing in the Gaza Strip and increased tensions among Venezuela, Ecuador and Columbia.

“I’ve been involved in every major national security challenge for the last 20 years that has faced this country,” McCain said. “I look forward to having that debate as to who’s most qualified in the event of a national crisis and the phone ringing at 3 a.m. in the White House.”

Asked what “3 a.m. moments” he has experienced, McCain mentioned sitting in the cockpit of a Navy aircraft on a carrier during the Cuban missile crisis and being “ready to be on the point of the spear.” He also cited his support for the troop surge in the unpopular Iraq war, a strategy President Bush later adopted.

Clinton started running the ad, a foreboding spot that plays on voter fears and uncertainties, in Texas, one of the states where she and Obama are battling in Tuesday’s primary elections. “It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safely asleep. Who do you want answering the phone?” the ad concludes.

Obama retorted that Clinton had her “red phone moment” when she voted to authorize the Iraq war. Then he parodied her ad with one of his own.

Fans of the game are obsessive. They play against friends, co-workers, family members and strangers, and many have several games going at once.

Everyone seems to love the online game — everyone, that is, except the companies that own the rights to Scrabble: Hasbro, which sells it in North America, and Mattel, which markets it everywhere else.

In January, they denounced Scrabulous as piracy and threatened legal action against its creators, two brothers in Calcutta named Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla who run a software development company. Both Hasbro and Mattel said they were hoping for a solution that would not force them to shut down the game.

Jayant Agarwalla, 21, said they did not create Scrabulous to make money, even though they now collect about $25,000 a month from online advertising. They just wanted to play Scrabble on their computers, and their favorite (unauthorized) site had started charging, he said.

“Our family has been playing the game for 50 years now,” he said, and received a set when the game first came out in India. His mother encouraged him and his 26-year-old brother, Rajat, to play as a learning tool, often with a dictionary by the board.

Scrabulous, which most users play on the Facebook social-networking site, has a board that looks just like Scrabble, and the same number of letter tiles with the same point values. Players can send invitations to others on Facebook or search for strangers to play with by posting messages.

There is no time limit for moves or games. Scrabulous keeps track of player statistics, and it does not allow fake words. It cannot, however, prevent players from cheating. One method is an unaffiliated online “helper” program, which generates a list of possible words based on the letters a user has.

Two game companies, RealNetworks of Seattle and Electronic Arts of Redwood City, Calif., say they have signed deals with Hasbro to create online versions of the company’s games. Both say their versions of Scrabble will be out shortly. But Scrabulous has already brought Scrabble a newfound virtual popularity that none of the game companies could have anticipated.

The threat of legal action has not gained the companies many admirers. Many Scrabulous fans, some of whom say they bought the board game for the first time after playing the online version on Facebook, call their approach heavy-handed and out of touch.

“The big thing that Hasbro is missing is that this is targeting a young audience that in general is not into board games,” said Venkat Koduru, the 15-year-old founder of the Facebook group “Save Scrabulous.”

Mr. Koduru had three Scrabulous games going as of Wednesday. He has gathered names of more than 1,000 people who have pledged to never buy a Scrabble board if Hasbro and Mattel shut down the online game.

Other groups devoted to saving the game have recently been created on Facebook, including “Please God, I Have So Little: Don’t Take Scrabulous Too.” Tens of thousands of fans have joined in, threatening to boycott Hasbro and Mattel products.

Iain Morgan, 34, a music producer in London who goes by the name Iain Easy, is playing 25 games of Scrabulous at the same time. The funny thing is, he said, he was never a fan of the original board game.

Mr. Morgan, who is the host of a Facebook group called “Help, I’m a Scrabulous Addict,” attributes the game’s popularity to “all these people who are bored at work in their office,” and added that the game keeps him in regular contact with his mother.

The legal questions concerning Scrabulous are complicated by the interests of the companies that own the rights to Scrabble.

Harold Zeitz, senior vice president for games at RealNetworks, said Friday that he was working closely with the Agarwalla brothers to bring the official Scrabble game to Facebook users.

Hasbro, meanwhile, said in a statement that Electronic Arts was planning to release an online version of Scrabble this spring. And Mattel, which signed a deal with RealNetworks last July, says that settling with the Agarwallas would set a bad precedent.

Neither Hasbro nor Mattel would disclose the number of Scrabble board games they have sold since Scrabulous started becoming popular last year. Hasbro estimates it sells one million to two million Scrabble boards a year in North America.

To some online marketing experts, Scrabulous represents a turning point for the board game industry, which has struggled for years to recreate itself as new generations turned to alternatives like the Xbox and the GameBoy.

“If you’re Hasbro or Mattel, it isn’t in your interest to shut this down,” said Matt Mason, a consultant to the entertainment industry and author of “The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism.”

The board game industry will be forced to adapt, Mr. Mason predicts, just as the music industry has adjusted to unauthorized downloads of songs. “If something’s already out there and proven, the companies should go with it,” he said.

For their part, Mattel and Hasbro are trying to protect their franchise as consumers turn increasingly to the Internet for entertainment. They say they consider Scrabble a crown jewel and are working on marketing campaigns for the game’s 60th anniversary this year. The plans include adding anniversary labels to Scrabble packaging and introducing a folding edition of the deluxe Scrabble board.

Scrabble began as Lexico in 1931, the creation of an out-of-work architect, Alfred Mosher Butts. He determined the frequency of each letter in the game and its value by reviewing the front page of The New York Times. His patent was denied, and it was 17 years before he found a manufacturer, which renamed the game Scrabble.

It took many more years before Scrabble became popular, thanks in part to a Macy’s chairman who was a fan, according to the game’s official history.

The Scrabble brand in North America was passed from manufacturer to manufacturer. It landed with Hasbro in 1989. The British game maker J. W. Spear & Sons owned the rights outside North America until the company was bought by Mattel in 1994.

The board game has had a core group of close-knit, intense fans for decades. They attend tournaments, refer to amateurs as “living room players,” and memorize lists of two-letter words.

Until Scrabulous landed on Facebook, no one could have mistaken the game, which had only a few thousand users, for a fast-growing phenomenon.

The Agarwallas introduced their first Scrabble knockoff Web site, bingobinge.com, in August 2005, and renamed it Scrabulous.com a year later. In May 2007, one of the site’s users suggested they adapt the game as a Facebook application, and it took off.

After 25 years with the National Scrabble Association, John D. Williams Jr., the executive director, said he had seen numerous copyright infringements of Scrabble, but the Scrabulous program on Facebook was the most “widespread and intense.”

Dozens of other Web sites offer unauthorized versions of Scrabble, but most force users to play in real time or require clunky downloads to play.

“People believe it to be in the public domain, like chess,” Mr. Williams said. “The idea that Scrabble belongs to a corporation is something that people don’t or are unwilling to accept.”

The Agarwalla brothers are avid players themselves — Jayant had 14 Scrabulous games going as of Saturday, and Rajat was playing 19.

Jayant, who is responsible for the game’s player interface and customer support, said, “People rarely find time to sit down anymore with their family and friends, to invite people over, to prepare the tea and biscuits.”