Author of Twitter Account Isn\'t Philip Roth

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times Philip Roth

12:33 p.m. | Updated

The proprietor of a Twitter page identifying itself as the official account of Philip Roth could well be Nathan Zuckerman, his alter ego from novels like “The Ghost Writer,” but it is not Mr. Roth, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Goodbye, Columbus,” “Portnoy's Complaint” and “American Pastoral.”

“No, that is not Mr. Roth posting on Twitter,” a press representative for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which publishes Mr. Roth's books, said in an email on Wednesday.

The Twitter account, @PhilipRothOffic, published its first po st on Monday, which read: “I join Twitter today. It's easy…” The message was widely recirculated on Twitter and drew in numerous followers, including employees of The New York Times.

In the fall, Mr. Roth announced that he was retiring from writing fiction, though he told The Times then that one of his new favorite occupations was learning to use an iPhone he had recently purchased.

The @PhilipRothOffic account was also disavowed by the author Blake Bailey, who is writing a biography of Mr. Roth, and who wrote on his own Twitter account: “The real Philip Rothâ€"yes, himâ€"would have it known that he has NO twitter account, and it is MOST unlikely he ever shall.”

That did not discourage the person behind @PhilipRothOffic from announcing on Wednesday morning that he or she would soon be posting a new short story called “140″ at that site.

In a subsequent post, @PhilipRothOffic declared itself to be the handiwork of Tommasso Debenedetti, a journalist who has created fake Twitter pages for other well-known figures.