Naked Came the Stranger
Encyclopedia
Naked Came the Stranger is a 1969 novel written as a literary hoax
Hoax
A hoax is a deliberately fabricated falsehood made to masquerade as truth. It is distinguishable from errors in observation or judgment, or rumors, urban legends, pseudosciences or April Fools' Day events that are passed along in good faith by believers or as jokes.-Definition:The British...
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
Newsday
Newsday is a daily American newspaper that primarily serves Nassau and Suffolk counties and the New York City borough of Queens on Long Island, although it is sold throughout the New York metropolitan area...
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
Bestseller
A bestseller is a book that is identified as extremely popular by its inclusion on lists of currently top selling titles that are based on publishing industry and book trade figures and published by newspapers, magazines, or bookstore chains. Some lists are broken down into classifications and...
in 1969; they revealed the hoax later that year, further spurring the book's popularity.
Hoax
Mike McGrady, a NewsdayNewsday
Newsday is a daily American newspaper that primarily serves Nassau and Suffolk counties and the New York City borough of Queens on Long Island, although it is sold throughout the New York metropolitan area...
columnist, was convinced that popular American literary culture had become so base—with the best-seller lists dominated by the likes of Harold Robbins
Harold Robbins
Harold Robbins was one of the best-selling American authors of all time. During his career, he wrote over 25 best-sellers, selling over 750 million copies in 32 languages....
and Jacqueline Susann
Jacqueline Susann
Jacqueline Susann was an American author known for her best-selling novels. Her most notable work was Valley of the Dolls, a book that broke sales records and spawned an Oscar-nominated 1967 film and a short-lived TV series.-Early years:Jacqueline Susann was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to...
—that even a wretchedly written, literarily vacant work could succeed if enough sex
Sex
In biology, sex is a process of combining and mixing genetic traits, often resulting in the specialization of organisms into a male or female variety . Sexual reproduction involves combining specialized cells to form offspring that inherit traits from both parents...
was thrown in. In order to test his theory, in 1966 McGrady recruited a team of Newsday cohorts—according to Andreas Schroder, 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 CityNew York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
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
Long Island
Long Island is an island located in the southeast part of the U.S. state of New York, just east of Manhattan. Stretching northeast into the Atlantic Ocean, Long Island contains four counties, two of which are boroughs of New York City , and two of which are mainly suburban...
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. 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 ListNew York Times Best Seller list
The New York Times Best Seller list is widely considered the preeminent list of best-selling books in the United States. It is published weekly in The New York Times Book Review magazine, which is published in the Sunday edition of The New York Times and as a stand-alone publication...
, 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
Darby Lloyd Rains
Darby Lloyd Rains is a former adult film actress, prolific during the 1970s. She is a member of the XRCO Hall of Fame. She appeared uncredited as a stripper in the 1971 film The French Connection.-Partial filmography:...
.
See also
- I, LibertineI, LibertineI, Libertine was a literary hoax that began as a practical joke by late-night radio raconteur Jean Shepherd. Shepherd was highly annoyed at the way that the bestseller lists were being compiled in the mid-1950s...
, an earlier literary hoax - Atlanta NightsAtlanta NightsAtlanta Nights is a collaborative novel created in 2004 by a group of science fiction and fantasy authors, with the express purpose of producing a bad piece of work of unpublishable quality to test whether publishing firm PublishAmerica would still accept it...
, a later literary hoax