Wonder Woman's origin.

• Author: Doherty, Brian
• Position: Briefly Noted - The Secret History of Wonder Woman - Brief article - Book review

In The Secret History of Wonder Woman (Knopf), New Yorker writer Jill Lepore tells the wild story of crackpot psychologist William Moulton Marston. After bouncing from university job to university job and playing a botched role in a murder case that kept the lie detector he invented (but failed to patent) on the far outskirts of American courts, he settled down in an extralegal plural marriage that included birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger's niece.

Marston then parlayed his role as a supposedly respectable academic advisor to the reviled early comic book industry into the creation of Wonder...