I was a regular reader of
Playboy magazine when I was a teenager in the 1960s.
Yes, I looked at the photos
of the women, but I also enjoyed the magazine’s cartoons and jokes, the feature
articles, the long-form Q&As, and the fiction.
With the recent death of publisher
Hugh Hefner, Ian Youngs at the BBC News looks back at 11 notable authors who
wrote for the magazine, which includes Jack Kerouac, Ray Bradbury and Ian
Fleming.
No-one ever really believed
any man who used the old excuse for buying Playboy magazine - "for the
articles", as opposed to for the photos of nude women.
The nude women were the main
attraction.
Yet the magazine does have a
long and proud literary tradition, publishing stories by authors like John
Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, Arthur C Clarke, Margaret Atwood and Haruki Murakami.
Playboy founder Hugh Hefner,
who has died at the age of 91, once joked with a group of centrefolds at a
magazine anniversary party: "Ladies, it's been a wonderful 25 years, and I
owe it all to you. Without you, I would have had nothing but a literary
magazine."
Former Playboy literary editor
Amy Grace Loyd summed up the magazine's formula in 2009: "You've got
things drawing a man's eye, then you've got things that are enriching his
intellectual and spiritual life."
… Playboy also gave authors
an outlet for stories with uncensored, adult and controversial themes, and paid
its writers well.
"We were willing to
publish things that other people wouldn't publish, and writers were very happy
about that," Hefner said. "And very quickly we had the largest
circulation in the men's field so we were able to pay more money."
You can read the rest of the
piece via the below link:
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