Naked Came the Stranger

A Long Island housewife, Penelope Ashe, was the author of Naked Came the Stranger, a badly written sex romp, which was published in 1969 and sold some millions of copies.


Not only did Penelope turn out to be mainly a man, she was revealed to be 19 men and 5 women. A group of writers and editors on Newsday magazine organized by Mike McGrady wrote the book over a weekend to demonstrate how quickly a trash novel could be produced. McGuire got his sister-in-law to play Penelope Ashe in interviews.

In 1970 McGrady wrote a book telling how they did it. He later wrote the autobiography of Linda Lovelace who was famous for being in the porn film Deep Throat.

The novel was filmed in 1975, still giving Penelope the credit.

• Mike McGrady et al writing as Penelope Ashe. Naked Came The Stranger. New York: L. Stuart, 1969. Fort Lee, N.J.: Barricade Books, 2003.
• Radley Metzger (dir). Naked Came The Stranger. Scr: Jake Barnes, based on the novel by Penelope Ashe, with Darby Lloyd Rains as Gillian Blake. US 83 mins 1975.
• Mike McGrady. Stranger than naked;: Or, How to write dirty books for fun and profit; a manual . P.H. Wyden 1970.
• Linda Lovelace and Mike McGrady. Ordeal. Star Books. 1982.
• Alex Boese. “Naked Came The Stranger”. The Museum of Hoaxes http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/Hoaxipedia/Naked_Came_The_Stranger/
• “Naked Came the Stranger”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Came_the_Stranger.