Author’s Unmasking May Undercut Book

In a book proposal recently sent to publishers, the writer known only as @GSElevator â€" a popular Twitter account consisting of things purportedly overheard inside ’s elevators â€" bragged about being aggressively recruited by the bank.

He said that after enduring more than 15 interviews, he landed a job, writing: “I have the offer and the guaranteed package.” The proposal then describes his career in fixed income, leaving publishers with the clear impression that he had worked at Goldman.

He had not.

“Almost Clintonian,” said one dismaye publisher who had seen the proposal.

“Very tricky wording,” said another editor on Tuesday.

A day after the author of the planned book, “Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance and Excess in the World of Investment Banking,” was revealed to be John Lefevre, a former bond salesman who was never employed by Goldman, Simon & Schuster stood by its author. It said that it had expected that his identity would eventually be uncovered.

“The great interest in the identity of who wa! s behind the Twitter feed, and in his employment history, only speaks to how much his @GSElevator tweets have been a lightning rod for conversation, as well as to the quality of his writing,” said a statement from the publisher.

A spokeswoman for Touchstone, the imprint of Simon & Schuster that acquired the book, said that it planned to proceed with publication. Yet Mr. Lefevre’s admission that he had never worked for Goldman appeared to undermine his credibility, if not the premise of his book. Publishers were drawn to the book because of the sardonic, sharply written Twitter feed, which has about 630,000 followers. “My Twitter feed,” said the 18-page proposal, “has hit a cultural nerve, offering an uncensored view into a world that is both envied and loathed, but never dull.”

In 2011, asked by The New York Times in an email if he was really a Goldman employee, he answered, “Yes. However, I cannot really elaborate on this in terms of team or location, other than to say that I am a career banker.” When asked what his Goldman colleagues were like, he said, “They are obsessed with working for Goldman Sachs.”

Contacted on Tuesday, Mr. Lefevre, 34, who lives in Texas and worked at Citigroup for seven years, declined to comment. His agent, Byrd Leavell, did not return a phone call.

When Touchstone acquired the book for six figures in January, the publi! sher said! it would go well beyond the Twitter feed to tell a wild, behind-the-scenes tale of the financial world. The book, planned for an October release, was promised to be “a humorous, insightful, and profoundly uncensored account of Wall Street.”

One publisher who considered bidding on the book said he was concerned about taking on a giant like Goldman Sachs, which used its power and resources to attack the credibility of “Why I Left Goldman Sachs,” the tell-all by Greg Smith, a former Goldman Sachs employee. Mr. Smith received a $1.5 million advance from Grand Central Publishing, but the book sold fewer than 20,000 copies in hardcover, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 85 percent of print sales.

Another publishing executive said that while there was an increasing tmptation to scout for potential projects on social media â€" the best-selling book “---- My Dad Says” was born as a Twitter feed â€" making bets on online performance art and parody is fraught with risk.

Late Tuesday, Kevin Roose, a writer for New York magazine (and former reporter for The New York Times) who has written extensively about @GSElevator, added a possible new twist to the imbroglio, writing that he had “credible proof” that the Twitter account was controlled by more than one author.

While Simon & Schuster is hardly the first publisher to face the uncomfortable question of whether to defend the integrity of one of its authors, the contou! rs of the! @GSElevator case seemed to defy simple comparisons.

Mr. Lefevre is not like Jonah Lehrer, whose pop-science books contained fabricated quotes by Bob Dylan, plagiarized passages and sloppy sourcing. The publisher of those books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, hurriedly pulled them from the shelves after Mr. Lehrer admitted his wrongs.

Mr. Lefevre was no Margaret Seltzer, the writer of a 2008 memoir that described her harrowing experiences running drugs for gang members in South-Central Los Angeles. She later confessed that she grew up in the Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles and attended a private Episcopal day school. The book was pulped.

And unlike Dlan Davies, the author of last year’s “The Embassy House,” Mr. Lefevre had not concocted a fake account of the Benghazi raid, a book that was recalled in October serving as the basis for a since-discredited “60 Minutes” report.

Touchstone declined to say whether it knew at the time of the acquisition that the author had never worked for Goldman. Before being exposed, Mr. Lefevre had originally planned to write the book under the pseudonym J. T. Stone.

At least one competing publisher appeared to be relieved to not be involved.

Will Weisser, an associate publisher at Portfolio, a division of Penguin, wrote o! n Twitter on Tuesday, “Nothing personal, @GSElevator, but I’m relieved that @portfoliobooks isn’t publishing your book.”

David Kuhn, a literary agent, suggested an alternative approach for Mr. Lefevre â€" a fictional exposé of high finance along the lines of other scathing romans à clef about Manhattan professional life like “Mergers and Acquisitions,” by Dana Vachon; “The Nanny Diaries” by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus; or “The Devil Wears Prada” by Lauren Weisberger.

“If I were him,” Mr. Kuhn said, “I would write a brilliant Wall Street novel.”