The Naked Truth: Authors Who Write in the Buff.

Posted by Alex in Book & Lit, Neatorama Only on January 30, 2007 at 2:49 pm


Writing takes a lot of focus – here are a few authors who got rid of all sorts of distractions, including their clothes, while writing:

When Victor Hugo [wiki], the famous author of great tomes such as Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, ran into a writer’s block, he concocted a unique scheme to force himself to write: he had his servant take all of his clothes away for the day and leave his own nude self with only pen and paper, so he’d have nothing to do but sit down and write.
Ernest Hemingway [wiki] did not only write A Farewell to Arms, he also said farewell to clothes! The inside dirt is that Hemingway wrote nude, standing up, with his typewriter about waist level. Indeed, there might be a nudist streak in the Hemingway genes: Ernest’s cousin Edward Hemingway opened Britain’s oldest nudist colony, a nine-bedroom chateau called Metherell Towers, back in the 1930s!
Perhaps it’s not so surprising that D.H. Lawrence [wiki], who wrote the controversial (and censored) erotic book Lady Chatterley’s Lover, liked to climb mulberry trees, in the nude, before coming down to write.
James Whitcomb Riley [wiki], America’s "Hoosier Poet," had his friends lock him up in a hotel room to write, naked, so he wouldn’t be tempted to go down to the bar for a drink.
French poet and author Edmond Rostand [wiki], who is best known for his play Cyrano de Bergerac, was so sick of being interrupted by his friends that he took up working naked in his bathtub.
Apparently Rostand wasn’t the only one with this bright idea – Benjamin Franklin [wiki] also liked to take baths. In fact, he liked to take "air baths," where he sit around naked in a cold room for an hour or so while he wrote.

Mystery writer Agatha Christie [wiki], whose books have been translated in 40 languages and outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare, liked to write anywhere, including in the bathtub!

Sources: A Blank Page by Sam Elmore, In The Nude by So Many Books, Literary Life and Other Curiosities by Robert Hendrickson, Dressing to Write by Bibi’s Beat.

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COMMENT

11 comments to "The Naked Truth: Authors Who Write in the Buff."

  1. Sean Gandert
    January 31st, 2007 at 8:52 pm

    Also of note: Terry Jones of Monty Python fame.

  2. Sam
    February 1st, 2007 at 10:39 am

    And Sherwood Anderson, as described (not graphically, thankfully) in Kim Townsend's bio of the author.

  3. D.T. Shindler
    February 1st, 2007 at 2:36 pm

    Also add Harlan Ellison -- multi-award-winning American fantasist, author of "'Repent Harlequin! Said The Tick Tock Man" and "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" -- who, when younger, liked to ocassionally write while starkers. One instance of such behavior --writing "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes" while sitting naked in a Las Vegas Hotel room -- resulted in his contracting pneumonia as a result! He's still around, still writing, and was recently nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature.

  4. Mojo Yugen
    February 1st, 2007 at 4:23 pm

    Victor Hugo sat around nude all day and the ONLY thing he could find to do was write?

  5. N. Q.
    February 7th, 2007 at 10:42 am

    I'm pretty sure that Douglas Adams (Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy) wrote naked too.

  6. ad-nonsense
    February 8th, 2007 at 10:11 am

    You have to love the adsense ads;

    Young Nude
    Find Young Nude! Buy Young Nude on eBay

    I thought ebay banned that sort of selling.

  7. clair
    February 8th, 2007 at 10:18 am

    I think it was mentioned in the New Yorker or the Times (?) that Alan Greenspan used to work in the bathtub. Think of all the naked memo writers!

  8. kelly
    February 8th, 2007 at 10:19 am

    Interesting how very many of these authors are men, isn't it?

  9. maki
    February 8th, 2007 at 1:51 pm

    You didn't include maybe the most famous nude writer...Jean-Paul Marat, journalist, propagandist, etc. of the French Revolution. He had Very Itchy Skin which he thought he had contracted while hiding out in the sewers of Paris (though some modern day people think he might have suffered from celiac disease) and the only place he could be comfortable was sitting in the bathtub. Therefore, he did mostof his writing while in the bath, and he was murdered in that state by Charlotte Corday, as immortalized in a painting by David.

  10. KaneCitizen
    February 8th, 2007 at 11:31 pm

    Don't forget historian Forrest McDonald. Booknotes Interview:

    LAMB: If we could see you in your environment writing this book, what would we see?

    McDONALD: You'd see me writing in the nude most of the time.

    LAMB: In the nude?

    McDONALD: Yes. We live in total isolation out in the country. They don't even read the electric meter because the electric man can't find it. We have to read our own meter. We've got wonderful isolation, and it's warm most of the year in Alabama and why wear clothes? I mean, they're just a bother. You'd see me sitting on the porch. We have a house that's mainly glass and otherwise screen and sitting out on the porch with a big 8-and-a-half-by-14 yellow tablet and writing. I write it out by hand. My wife, who is a very fine harpsichordist and has become a fantastic typist, then transcribes. I do a lot of editing before I turn it over to her, and then she edits with her fingers as she goes along. So we're really at a third or fourth draft by the time we get a first typed draft. We never use word processors, and then we'll let it sit and edit it some more. I'll keep on writing.

  11. Brian O'Mara-Croft, Author, Lost in the Hive
    October 14th, 2009 at 1:11 pm

    I'd write in the nude as well, if it would sell books.


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