Mike McGrady

Michael Robinson McGrady (October 4, 1933 – May 13, 2012) was an American journalist and author. He is best known for orchestrating the 1969 literary hoax Naked Came the Stranger, a novel he wrote with a group of fellow Newsday journalists as an attempt to parody the bestsellers of the era, with the book becoming a hit in its own right.

Early and personal life

McGrady was born in New York City, and grew up in Lilliwaup, Washington and Port Washington, New York. He graduated from Yale University in 1955, and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1968 and 1969.

In 1959, McGrady married Corinne Young, and they had three children. He had one previous marriage which ended in divorce.

Career

In 1962, McGrady became a columnist for Newsday, a newspaper based on Long Island, where he wrote about the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. His columns about the war, written from the frontlines in a series called a A Dove in Vietnam, won an award from the Overseas Press Club in 1967 and were later published as a book.

Naked Came the Stranger

In 1966, he assembled a group of two dozen fellow Newsday writers to create novel that would parody the prurient bestsellers of the era, which he found to be badly written, citing Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls as a particular impetus. He wanted the book to be sexually explicit and of low literary quality, and had each participant write one deliberately poor chapter.