fistfight with his son. Carter's body was returned to Alabama for burial near Anniston. Controversy and criticism Carter spent the last part of his life trying to conceal his background as a Klansman and segregationist, claiming categorically in a 1976 New York Times article that he, Forrest, was not Asa Carter. The article describes a 1974 interview of Carter by Barbara Walters on the Today television show where Carter was going under the name "Forrest" while promoting The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales. The Times reported that Carter, who had run for governor of Alabama (as Asa Carter) just four years earlier, was identified by several Alabama politicians, reporters, and law enforcement officials who watched the Today show segment as being the same person as Asa Carter. The Times also reported that the address Carter used in the copyright application for The Rebel Outlaw was identical to the one that he used in 1970 while running for governor. "Beyond denying that he is Asa Carter", the article noted, "the author has declined to be interviewed on the subject." In 1985, Carter's autobiography was purchased for a paperback edition and marketed by the University of New Mexico Press as a memoir. It was subtitled "A True Story by Forrest Carter". The story described the relationship between the boy and his Scottish-Cherokee grandfather, a man named Wales (an overlap with Carter's other fiction). Written from the perspective of a boy orphaned at age five, the book described how he had become accustomed to life in a remote mountain hollow with his "Indian thinking" "Granpa" and Cherokee "Granma", who called him "Little Tree". Granpa runs a small whiskey operation during Prohibition and the later years of the Great Depression. The grandparents and visitors to the hollow expose Little Tree to (supposed) Cherokee ways and "mountain people" values. The state removes him to an orphanage, where he stays for a few months until an old Indian friend intimidates the director into allowing Little Tree's release. (In life, Carter was neither orphaned, nor raised by Cherokee grandparents.) Before taking a new name and identity, Carter had claimed to have distant maternal Cherokee ancestry, a claim corroborated by some of his family members. Delacorte Press's original author biography referred to Carter as the Cherokee "Storyteller in Council". Members of the Cherokee nation have disputed his claim; they said so-called "Cherokee" words and customs in The Education of