This was before my time, but about 30 years ago, a group of journalists pulled off a (famous?) hoax. They invented a persona named “Penelope Ashe”, a “housewife” who wrote a trashy “soft-core porn” book called Naked Came The Stranger. It supposedly caused a huge sensation in the publishing industry, and there was a great deal of hype when it was published. Then the journalists revealed that there was no “Penelope Ashe”, and it was a joke on the publishing industry and the public.
Supposedly this book was a very racy look inside the sex lives of “ordinary” women, so it caused an uproar over it at the time. The authors were trying to make a point about the emptyness of the publishing industry and the huge appetite of the public for a book about bored-housewife-nookie. The book was treated as a hoax, and was a huge embarassment to the publishers. As a result the book is no longer in print of even availiable as far as I know.
Does anyone else remember this? Was it such a big deal at the time? And was the book really “pornographic”, or just a bit on the blue side. I am sort of looking for a copy - for academic research purposes of course…
I found 3 copies for sale at Amazon.com. 2 were for about 5, the other was 20 something. There’s one auction for it at eBay plus a second one that’s an R rated movie made from the book.
There’s an interesting bio for Penelope Ashe at the IMDB here. And the movie made from it is here.
[url=“http://www.vix.com/menmag/gtch10ex.htm”]This[/url isn’t directly related to the novel or movie but there’s a wierd ‘male’ exercise for talking with ‘our Brothers’ called ‘Naked Came the Stranger.’ It includes steps such as step “7. Optional: Take individual or group photo of naked men.”
I read it more than 20 years ago. It’s not the worst book ever written, but it is fairly boring. It was actually written by a group of writers and editors at The Long Island Newsday, the only one of whom you might have heard of was Stanley Asimov, Isaac Asimov’s brother. It’s only softcore porn, not anything hardcore. I suspect it’s no better or worse than most pornography.
The book wasn’t withdrawn or anything. It was selling quite well when word of the hoax leaked out. But the publisher didn’t rush to withdraw it. If anything, it bumped its sales up (it ended up the number 7 best seller of the year).
You may be conflating this with the Clifford Irving “Howard Hughes biography” hoax. The publisher took a beating on that one. But that was a nonfiction book turning out to be fiction; “Naked Came the Stranger” was a fiction book turning out to be fiction – hardly scandalous.
The book wasn’t “pornographic” except under the strictest of definitions. It was similar to books like “The Love Machine,” “The Inheritors,” or “The Seven Minutes” – all big bestsellers that year. There was sex in it, but definitely softcore.
It’s not all that hard to find. A search at bibliofind shows over 20 copies available. There are 32 matches as Alibris.
Like most novels of that time that were not sold under the Beeline books name (aka stroke books), the cover promised a lot more than the copy delivered.
I remember that time because Life magazine published an article, complete with a picture of the staffers posed around the cardboard cutout of the cover.
Naked Came the Stranger was the brainchild of Mike McGrady, who got the idea in 1966 of asking his fellow Newsday reporters to intentionally write a sleazy bestseller. Twenty four writers wrote a chapter apiece and the novel was completed within a single week. McGrady got his sister in law, Billie Young, to pretend to be the author and the book was published in July 1969. The secret of the book’s collective authorship didn’t hold long; within less than a month the story broke. Despite this, the book’s hardcover sales continued for two years and the subsequent paperback edition remained in print for over eight years. McGrady wrote a book on the story, Stranger than Naked, in 1970.
Amazon’s a waste of money for out-of-print stuff. I found over 89 copies of Naked Came The Stranger over at Bookfinder, and most of them are less than five bucks.