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."

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."

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."

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Wikipedia