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ALTHOUGH SOMETIMES PURCHASED BECAUSE OF A PLAYMATE’ S ALLURE, most Playboy magazines get read cover-to-cover, confirming the quip “I buy it for the articles.” Because less than ten percent of each issue contains nudity, the majority of monthly pages are well-known editorial features, such as the Playboy Advisor or the Playboy Interview, advice columns, cultural commentary, humor and literary selections. Using Esquire as a model, Hugh Hefner published fiction to position Playboy as more than a mere “skin-magazine.” Hefner juxtaposed the nude pictorials with literature because he believed that, for proper stimulation, both the mind and body should be addressed. The quantity of fiction published in Playboy is astonishing, making fiction the single largest component of the magazine. In just its first year of publication, from December 1953 to 1954, Playboy devoted 168 pages to literary selections, over thirty percent of its content (Lambkin 26). In the 1960s the magazine maintained over 200-page issues and published elite critics and authors such as Alfred Kazin, William F. Buckley, Leslie Fiedler, Ray Bradbury, James Baldwin, and Vladimir Nabokov. Most of Playboy’s fiction is either written by popular, contemporary authors or can be classified as a parody by an unknown author of a famous story. The cultural currency of contemporary authors or familiar narratives helped sell copies—by 1973, Playboy’s paid circulation peaked at seven million per month (Pitzulo 12). Playboy editors particularly sought out authors or fictional selections that would help them re-masculinize the act of reading in the midst of the Cold War gender debates. To fulfill this objective, editors first looked to Ernest Hemingway because the Hemingway code hero exemplifies the quintessential Playboy qualities—strong, adventuresome, educated, and womanizing
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Then, after his death in 1961, Playboy used Hemingway’s obvious successor— Norman Mailer.