There is a small community in north-central Ohio named Clyde. Back in 1919, a man named Sherwood Anderson, who had grown up in Clyde, published a book of short stories called Winesburg, Ohio. But rather than being proud that one of their hometown boys had made good, a lot of the residents resented Anderson. It didn't take them long to figure out that the fictional Winesburg that served as the setting for his stories was a thinly disguised Clyde, and in the foibles and flaws of his characters, several of the townspeople recognized themselves. What they saw did not please them.

Actually, writers of fiction have been inventing characters based on real people for a long time, though often they mix things up enough that the persons copied do not identify themselves as easily as the Clyde peopl…