Mike McGrady

He wanted to prove a point about bad taste, and he did it very well. Though Newsday columnist Mike McGrady, who died May 13 at 78, won an Overseas Press Club award for his dispatches from Vietnam, he will always be remembered too as the orchestrator of the 1969 literary hoax Naked Came the Stranger. A cringe-inducing naughty-housewife novel “by Penelope Ashe,” it was actually the work of McGrady and his newsroom buddies. Meant as a parody of trashy best sellers, it quickly became one. “Some of the chapters were much too good,” a bemused McGrady told Time after the truth came out. “I had to work like hell to make them bad enough to use.”