Mike McGrady

Mike McGrady (October 4, 1933 – May 13, 2012) was an American journalist and author and was the mastermind behind Naked Came the Stranger, one of the most famous literary hoaxes of the twentieth century.

"He wanted to prove a point about bad taste, and he did it very well. Though Newsday Columnist Mike McGrady, who died May 13 at 78 won an Overseas Press Club award for his dispatches from Vietnam, he will always be remembered too as the orchestrator of the 1969 literary hoax 'Naked Came the Stranger'. A cringe inducing naughty-housewife novel by "Penelope Ashe," it was actually the work of McGrady and his newsroom buddies. Meant as a parody of trashy best sellers, it quickly became one. "Some of the chapters were too good," a bemused McGrady told Time after the truth came out. "I had to work like hell to make them bad enough to use."[1]

Sex sells, his spoof sold many more copies than his prize winning book, A Dove in Vietnam which was McGrady's answer to a hawkish challenge from John Steinbeck. Replacing Steinbeck in Newsday, his columns were widely syndicated in the U.S. and abroad by Newsday and the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. And his work won the Overseas Press Club Award for best interpretive reporting of foreign affairs.

In a May 22, 2012 piece Bob Keeler relates he didn't like Steinbeck's letters from the war and proposed he go there to write a series called "A Dove in Vietnam". The publisher Bill Moyers—LBJ's former press secretary—liked the idea. The resulting stories told the ugly truth about the war. They also soured Guggenheim's relationship with his star, Moyers"...... " When people talk about Mike, that book should leap to mind -- not the naked hoax book. The Vietnam War was a far more deadly hoax, and Mike wrote powerfully to expose it for what it was. In the pages of Newsday, on that poisonously divisive war, John Steinbeck was flat wrong. Mike McGrady was absolutely right. This is no small epitaph for a great life."[2]

According to the 1990 book: Newsday A Candid History of the Respectable Tabloid, Wm Morrow & Co. by Robert Keeler, both the spoof and his coverage deepened the divide between Newsday's owner and its publisher Bill Moyers which eventually led to the sale of Newsday to the Los Angeles Times and Moyers resignation.

On the day after his May 15, 2012 obituary in the New York Times, a Times editorial entitled "Stranger Than Fiction" pointed out: "Mr. McGrady's strange success was a product of its times, which happened to be very good ones for newspapers. That newsroom in particular -- Newsday's in Garden City, Long Island -- was a close knit group of men and women who won Pulitzer Prizes and covered the world. Mr. McGrady's bad fiction project, in fact, was interrupted by a reporting tour of Vietnam and then a Neiman Fellowship at Harvard. What he built in the years that followed --news articles and columns, movie and restaurant reviews -- remains a fine body of work, all on top of the fame from "Naked Came the Stranger."[3]

His subsequent book Stranger than Naked or How to Write Dirty Books for Fun and Profit, a manual, Wyden 1970. Mike McGrady tells the wonky naked truth behind the spoof. Although a romp, McGrady's intent was deadly serious. Serious enough to turn down an offer of a half million dollars for a sequel.[4]

In an era that preferred its women in the kitchen, Mike McGrady continued to challenge the status quo. Coining the word househusband he switched roles with his wife for a year. That experiment was the basis of his book; The Kitchen Sink Papers, my life as a househusband. Portions of the book were widely syndicated by Newsday and the Los Angeles Times. Published by both Doubleday and New American Library, it went on to become a Readers Digest Condensed Book.

"Women looked at me as if I were trying to break into prison", he told the Los Angeles Times in 1975. "Men looked at me as if I were Benedict Arnold."

In Lord of Publishing, Open Road 2013, legendary literary agent Sterling Lord tells us "Mike McGrady was no ordinary journalist". He also notes, "while a househusband is a common occurrence in the twenty-first century, when Mike wrote the book in 1975, he was moving into uncharted domesticity." (Mike McGrady dedicated the book to his daughter.)

Hitting a nerve in his often reprinted Feb. 2, 1976 Newsweek My Turn piece: "Let'em Eat Leftovers" can be found in many current anthologies. Among them Growing Ideas: a Reader for Writers, Between Worlds, a reader, rhetoric and handbook and Discovering Ideas: An Anthology for Writers

Women's issues were never foreign to McGrady, in his grandfather Frank Robinson's 1911 bid for the Washington state legislature as Farmer-Labor candidate, Article 9 read:

Better pay and working conditions for girls and women so that the world may be as fair a place for my three girls as it is for my three boys.

On May 20, 2012 the Los Angeles Times wrote: "His experiences switching roles with his wife turned him into a feminist, which may have influenced his decision to write two books with "Deep Throat" star, Linda Lovelace: Ordeal (1980) and Out of Bondage(1986) which detail the abuse she endured in the pornography industry."[5]

He was as ahead of his time as his grandfather was. People were unready for the Linda Lovelace story until Gloria Steinem stepped in with an article in MS Magazine after Ordeal was published. Ordeal became an international best seller and turned Linda into a feminist heroine of the women's movement speaking out against pornography at government hearings, feminist groups and colleges. Lovelace later testified before the 1986 U.S. Attorney General's Commission on Pornography. And Gloria Steinem wrote the introduction to the second book Out of Bondage.

While Ordeal was on the best seller list, his brother, a well known science writer joined him on the list. People Magazine June 8, 1980 noted "Here's One for the Book: Simultaneous Best-Sellers by the McGrady Brothers" "The Bronte sisters and the Waugh brothers made it big as writers, but Pat and Mike McGrady have done what no siblings in history have accomplished --this spring they've been on the best seller list at the same time. a first..."[6]

Between stints writing books and magazine pieces, McGrady wrote for Newsday. At the forefront of his era he made a critical impact on the culture. As a columnist, he went from Selma to Montgomery, to confrontations in the streets of Chicago. Talking with writers, politicians, starlets and kids, he commented on life including family life and won the National Headliner's Award for "Consistently Outstanding Columns". As a foreign correspondent he dug into history in the making, from Saigon to Hanoi and won the Overseas Press Club Award. Trading hats later in his career he reviewed restaurants for the paper. His days at Newsday began an ended as the paper's film critic.

His papers are housed at Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Books by Mike McGrady

References

  1. ↑ Time Magazine May 28, 2012
  2. ↑ Newsday by Bob Keeler, May 22, 2012
  3. ↑ New York Times Editorial May 16, 2012
  4. ↑ The Washington Post by Matt Schudel, May 16, 2012
  5. ↑ Los Angeles Times by Elaine Woo, May 20, 2012
  6. ↑ People Magazine June 8, 1980
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