The implied author is a concept of literary criticism developed in the 20th century. Distinct from the author and the narrator, the term refers to the "authorial character" that a reader infers from a text based on the way a literary work is written. In other words, the implied author is a construct, the image of the writer produced by a reader as called forth from the text. The implied author may or may not coincide with the author's expressed intentions or known personality traits.
In particular, all aspects of the text can be attributed to the design of the implied author--everything can be read as having meaning--even if the real author was simply "nodding" or a textual element was "unintentional." A story's apparent theme or implications (as evidenced within the text) can be attributed to the implied author even if disavowed by the flesh and blood author (FBA).
For example, while "real" author J.K. Rowling has expressed solidarity with the LGBT community, the implied author of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them has been be said to convey no such solidarity, since "the only person that Rowling has ever written as definitively queer in her text is portrayed as pedophilic and manipulative and also a fascist" (Taylor Follett. "Fantastic Beasts: Amazing Writing and Terrible Representation" Daily Californian, Nov. 28th, 2016).
Author Saul Bellow once observed that it was not surprising, with all the revision that goes into a work, that an author might appear better on the page than in real life.
History
Following the hermeneutics tradition of Goethe, Thomas Carlyle and Benedetto Croce, Intentionalists P. D. Juhl and E. D. Hirsch Jr. insist that the correct interpretation of a text reflects the intention of the real author exactly. However, under the influence of structuralism, Roland Barthes declared "the death of the (real) author", saying the text speaks for itself in reading. Anti-intentionalists, such as Monroe Beardsley and Roger Fowler, also thought that interpretation should be brought out only from the text. They held that readers should not confuse the meaning of the text with the author's intention, pointing out that one can understand the meaning of a text without knowing anything whatsoever about the author.
In his 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne C. Booth introduced the term implied author to distinguish the virtual author of the text from the real author. In addition, he proposed another concept, the career-author: a composite of the implied authors of all of a given author's works.
Gérard Genette used the term focalization to distinguish the point of view of a work ("who sees?") from the focal position of a work ("who perceives?") In his 1972 book Narrative Discourse, he took issue with Booth's classifications (among others), suggesting three terms to organize works by focal position:
Mieke Bal argued that Genette's focalizations did not describe the implied author, but only the narrator of the story.
Seymour Chatman, in his book Coming to Terms, posits that the act of reading is "ultimately an exchange between real human beings [that] entails two intermediate constructs: one in the text, which invents it upon each reading (the implied author), and one outside the text, which construes it upon each reading (the implied reader)." Because the reader cannot engage in dialogue with the implied author to clarify the meaning or emphasis of a text, Chatman says, the concept of the implied author prevents the reader from assuming that the text represents direct access to the real author or the fictional speaker. Chatman also argues for the relevance of the implied author as a concept in film studies, a position that David Bordwell disputes.
Hans-Georg Gadamer also considered the text as a conversation with the reader.