History Main / RomanAClef

* Creator/DavidFincher's 2007 film ''Film/{{Zodiac}}'', based on the novel of the same name by Robert Graysmith. The movie uses the real names of all the people involved, and is thus actually truer to real life than the book, which used pseudonyms at the time.

* The Vassilis Vassilikos novel ''Literature/{{Z}}'' writes about the assassination of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregoris_Lambrakis a left-wing politician]]. That it is a Roman A Clef is made particularly clear in TheFilmOfTheBook, above.

* The vast majority of Creator/JackKerouac's novels are simply retellings of things that happened to him and the other Beat writers, with the names changed (and some parts taken out, as the first draft of ''Literature/OnTheRoad'' reveals). ''On The Road'' and ''Visions of Cody'' focus on his best friend Neal Cassady, ''The Dharma Bums'' is about his adventures with Gary Snyder, ''And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks'' (written with Creator/WilliamSBurroughs) was about a mutual friend who murdered a lover, and so forth. It became so well-known that the publisher insisted he use different character names in each book to prevent legal trouble for anyone involved, but [[http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1385865 they can still be decoded easily]].

* Spoofed in "Mathcounts" a Dragnet parody about detectives that used math skills to solve crimes that ran as part of ''Series/ThreeTwoOneContact''. Every episode began with the narrator stating "the story you're about to hear is a fib, but it's short. The names are made up but the (math) problems are real."

* ''Theatre/TheGlassMenagerie'' by Tennessee Williams is widely believed to be essentially autobiographical.

* The infamous 1979 ExploitationFilm ''Guyana: Crime of the Century'' (aka ''Guyana: Cult of the Damned'') was made just months after the Jonestown tragedy, and was all about Congressman "Lee O'Brian" and his journey to Guyana to investigate Rev. "James Johnson" and his remote jungle commune called "Johnsontown".

* Parodied in one of Frank Muir's monologues on ''My Word!'', where he explains he's going to call a character Lafcadio Quilp to protect his anonymity, before adding "His mother is the dreadful Mrs Snaith who runs the school dinners at a Staines educational establishment, I have met her son Ron a few times."

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* ''Film/TheHarderTheyFall'': This film, in which sleazy boxing promoters build up a boxer named Toro into a heavyweight championship contender via a series of fixed fights, is a take on the controversial career of Primo Carnera, 1930s boxer. Like Toro, Carnera was a foreign import (Argentina for Toro, Italy for Carnera). Like Toro, Carnera was a giant of a man who hulked over the smaller heavyweights of that era. Like Toro, Carnera was in the clutches of shady corrupt promoters. Like Toro, Carnera won a series of boxing matches that were later said to be rigged in his favor. Like Toro, Carnera takes a brutal beating when he faces a real boxer, getting knocked down 11 times before he finally loses by TKO. And just to make it more obvious, the boxer who knocks out Toro is played by Max Baer, who knocked out Carnera in RealLife, and thus is playing a fictionalized version of himself.

* ''Theatre/LaughterOnThe23rdFloor is a play written by Creator/NeilSimon based on his experience as a young writer for Creator/SidCaesar.

* ''Film/AlmostFamous'' is a fictionalized autobiography of writer-director Cameron Crowe's teenage years as a writer for Rolling Stone, with the sort-of FakeBand Stillwater as expy of numerous bands he had encounters with in TheSeventies. (The band Stillwater existed IRL, just not with the songs played during the movie.)

** This trope is also played in a very meta way in ''Literature/EvaLuna'': the soap opera Eva ends writing turns out to be the very book we're reading (which, by the way, is mostly her autobiography and the biography of her love interests), and her {{transgender}} actress friend ends interpreting herself and her transition to great success and acclaim.

* The infamous 1979 quickie ExploitationFilm ''Guyana: Crime of the Century'' (aka ''Guyana: Cult of the Damned'') was made just months after the Film/{{Jonestown}} tragedy, and was all about Congressman "Lee O'Brian" and his journey to Guyana to investigate Rev. "James Johnson" and his remote jungle commune called "Johnsontown".

* ''Literature/ThePictureOfDorianGray'' by Creator/OscarWilde is often called a ''roman à clef''. However, in this case the "key" is not that it's based on specific people, but that [[GettingCrapPastTheRadar it's about homosexuality]].

Compare VeryLooselyBasedOnATrueStory, {{Biopic}}, {{Docudrama}}, AnonymousRinger, HistoricalDomainCharacter. For an inversion, see BiographyAClef, where CaptainErsatz of fictional characters and events are retrofitted to tell the life of the artist and creator.

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* The intro of ''Film/TheGreatDictator'' references this.

* ''Literature/Anathem '' is this for the whole history of Western philosophy. Readers can identify individuals such as Plato , Diogenes or Bertrand Russell, or movements such as Kantian thought.

* ''Film/{{Bombshell}}'' features Creator/JeanHarlow as Lola Burns, in a satirical take on the life of Creator/ClaraBow. Lola wants to get married and retire to the desert, which Bow did in RealLife.
* The original ''[[Film/{{Scarface1932}} Scarface]]'' is largely inspired by the life of Al Capone, but with plenty of fictional elements put in as well.

* ''The Fixer'' by Bernard Malamud is based on the blood-libel trial of Mendel Beilis, going so far as to lift a good number of passages from Beilis's memoir ''The Story of My Sufferings''.