One very successful bestseller in the late 1960s was the salacious work of Long Island housewife Penelope Ashe, who penned Naked Came the Stranger. The book is centered around the adulterous adventures of heroine Gillian Blake and featured, among her many other sexual encounters, a tryst with a Shetland pony. Ashe was the guest at numerous bookstore signings and talk shows.
Towards the end of 1969, nineteen males appeared on the David Frost Show as "Penelope Ashe" and revealed that they, along with five female colleagues, had actually written the book and that there was no real Penelope Ashe.
The scheme had been concocted by Michael McGrady, a columnist for Newsday. McGrady had developed the hypothesis, based upon other literary triumphs of the time, that all any author needed for a modern bestseller was to put as much prurient garbage in his work as possible. To test this theory, he enlisted the above-described 24 individuals from the Newsday staff and instructed each one to write a chapter in the book. He emphasized that there could be no redeeming social value or literary merit in their efforts and warned them that any true excellence in writing would quickly be blue-penciled into oblivion. In order to avoid any real plot or continuity within the novel which could be associated with decent literature, each author was to follow his or her own path--although there was one meeting in advance to determine a bare (so to speak) amount of consistencies, such as whether Gillian's skin was milky or tawny and whether her breasts were pert and patridgey or bodacious and melony*. The paramount requirement that McGrady imposed was that there had to be "an unremitting emphasis on sex." When the chapters were done, McGrady painstakingly edited the prose to make it worse.
McGrady then enlisted his sister-in-law to portray Penelope Ashe, and the book was immediately picked up by a major publisher and started selling like hot cakes. The revelation of the scheme later on sent sales even higher. It is available on Kindle even today.
*The final decision was that her breasts would be "pendulums of passion swinging in the winds of lust."
That description certainly conjures up a vivid image.
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