Naked Came the Stranger

Cover of reissue of Naked Came the Stranger

Naked Came the Stranger is a 1969 novel written as a literary hoax poking fun at contemporary American culture. Though credited to "Penelope Ashe", it was in fact written by a group of twenty-four prominent journalists led by Newsday columnist Mike McGrady. McGrady's intention was to write a deliberately terrible book with a lot of sex, to illustrate the point that popular American literary culture had become mindlessly vulgar. The book fulfilled the authors' expectations and became a bestseller in 1969; they revealed the hoax later that year, further spurring the book's popularity.

Hoax

Mike McGrady, a Newsday columnist, was convinced that popular American literary culture had become so base—with the best-seller lists dominated by the likes of Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann—that even a wretchedly written, literarily vacant work could succeed if enough sex was thrown in. In order to test his theory, in 1966 McGrady recruited a team of Newsday cohorts—according to Andreas Schroder,^[1] the authors consisted of five women and 19 men, 24 writers in total—to collaborate on a sexually explicit novel with no literary or social value whatsoever. Writing under the pseudonym Penelope Ashe (portrayed by McGrady's sister-in-law for photographs and meetings with publishers), the group wrote the book as a deliberately inconsistent and mediocre hodge-podge, with each chapter written by a different author. Some of the chapters had to be heavily edited, because they were originally too well-written.

Synopsis

Gillian and William Blake are the hosts of a popular New York City breakfast radio chat show, The Billy & Gilly Show, where they play the perfect couple. When Gillian finds out that her husband is having an affair, she decides to cheat on him with a variety of men from their Long Island neighborhood. Most of the book is taken up by vignettes describing Gilly's adventures with a variety of men, from a progressive rabbi to a mobster crooner.

Reception

The book fulfilled McGrady's cynical expectations, selling approximately 90,000 copies by October 13, 1969.^[2] As sales continued to increase, many of the co-authors felt guilty about the large amounts of money they were earning, and went public. The male authors gave their "confession" on The David Frost Show, after being introduced as "Penelope Ashe" and walking out on stage, single file, as the orchestra played the song "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody". The book eventually spent one week on the New York Times Best-Seller List, although by that time its authorship was common knowledge. It is unclear how much of the book's success was due to its content and how much to publicity about its unusual origin.

Subsequently, McGrady and his collaborators were approached about writing a sequel; they refused. In 1970 McGrady published Stranger Than Naked, or How to Write Dirty Books for Fun and Profit which told the story of the hoax. Naked Came the Stranger later became the basis for an X-rated film starring Darby Lloyd Rains.

See also

Novels portal

• I, Libertine, an earlier literary hoax
• Atlanta Nights, a later literary hoax

Notes

1. ^ Schroder, Andreas. "Cheats, Charlatans, and Chicanery." McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1997.
2. ^ This figure, with according date, is quoted on the net-site 20th-Century American Bestsellers.

References

• Penelope Ashe (alias), "Naked Came the Stranger", 1969, ISBN 978-1569802625
• Mike McGrady, "Stranger Than Naked or How to Write Dirty Books for Fun", 1970

External links

• Twentieth Century Bestsellers—Naked Came the Stranger
• Naked Came the Stranger at the Internet Movie Database