He originated a hoax claiming that Charles Dickens met Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and has published work under a variety of other names, including Stephanie Harvey, Stephen Harvey, Graham Headley, Trevor McGovern, John Schellenberger, Leo Bellingham, Michael Lindsay, Ludovico Parra, and Janis Blodnieks.
In a letter to The London Review of Books, he stated that "practically everyone [he] met while an undergraduate 1966–69" was "bored, frustrated and above all disillusioned by an Oxford that was so much more mundane than their school daydreams".
The hoax, along with Harvey's record of pseudonymous publications and falsified citations, was exposed in April 2013 in an article in The Times Literary Supplement by Eric Naiman, Professor of Comparative Literature & Department Chair of Slavic Languages and Literatures at University of California, Berkeley; Naiman also noted that Harvey has been blacklisted from the journal History.
[3] Besides Oxford: the Novel, Harvey has published another novel, Warriors of the Rainbow, a work of science fiction about a reanimated woman and her lover, set in a world controlled by a shadowy cadre of whales.
He is also a published poet[7][8] (Sonnets, 2006[clarification needed]) and a prolific letter writer to the literary journals of the United Kingdom.