page_title: Typewriter
section_title: Others
hierarchical_section_title: Typewriter / Authors and writers who had notable relationships with typewriters / Others
caption_attribution_description: The "Faulkner portable": American novelist William Faulkner’s (1897-1962) Underwood Universal Portable typewriter, resting on a tiny desk his stepson helped him build. This space at Rowan Oak, the author's home, was part of the back porch until Faulkner spent part of a Random House advance to enclose it in 1952, long after he had written his seminal Compson and Sartoris family novels. He insisted that this room not be called his "study." According to biographer Joseph Blotner, "he did not study in it, so there was no sense in calling it that. It was the 'office,' the traditional name for the room in the plantation houses where the business was transacted." As to the typewriter itself, Underwood introduced its Universal Portable in the mid-l930's among a full line of portables such as Champion, Noiseless Portable and Junior. Faulkner had a habit of buying used portables locally, wearing them out, then trading them in on more used portables. This Underwood was one of at least three typewriters in Faulkner`s possession at the time of his death (the University of Virginia has one, too). So, this is no more "the" typewriter any more than those square carpenter`s pencils next to it are "the" pencils. Had Faulkner lived a few more years, this machine would have met the same fate as the rest. Still, the room has a resonance. BOOK magazine was publishing an article of mine on "Yoknapatourism," and thinking (mistakenly) that the editors hadn`t already selected a photographer, I returned to Oxford on a rainy October afternoon to make my own pictures for submission. The travel piece was eventually illustrated with sunny-day brochure shots, but I was happy to keep this one for myself. There was no direct lighting within the office, so I let the film take its time, soaking up faint incandescent glow from the library and main hallway, which neatly balanced the cloudy daylight. I used the camera`s timer so my hand wouldn't jostle the tripod, and I even backed out of the room--in part to let the scarce light do its work and, I think, because I wanted Faulkner`s office truly vacant. Trivia: the book next to the typewriter is the 1939 edition of Writer's Market. Thanks to Bill Griffith, curator of Rowan Oak, for letting me past the Lucite wall and to Milly Moorhead West for lending me the tripod. - Gary Bridgman
context_page_description: A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical machine for typing characters similar to those produced by a printer's movable type. Typically, a typewriter has an array of keys, and each one causes a different single character to be produced on the paper, by means of a ribbon with dried ink struck against the paper by a type element similar to the sorts used in movable type letterpress printing. On some typewriters, a separate type element corresponds to each key; others use a single type element with a different portion of it used for each character. At the end of the nineteenth century, the term typewriter was also applied to a person who used a typing machine.
  The first commercial typewriters were introduced in 1874, but did not become common in offices until after the mid-1880s. The typewriter quickly became an indispensable tool for practically all writing other than personal handwritten correspondence. It was widely used by professional writers, in offices, and for business correspondence in private homes.
  Typewriters were a standard fixture in most offices up to the 1980s. Thereafter, they began to be largely supplanted by computers.
context_section_description: William S. Burroughs wrote in some of his novels—and possibly believed—that "a machine he called the 'Soft Typewriter' was writing our lives, and our books, into existence", according to a book review in The New Yorker. In the film adaptation of his novel Naked Lunch, his typewriter is a living, insect-like entity (voiced by North American actor Peter Boretski) and actually dictates the book to him.
  Writer Zack Helm and director Mark Forster explored the potential mechanics of the "Soft Typewriter" philosophy in the movie Stranger than Fiction, in which the very act of typing up her handwritten notes gives a fiction writer the power to kill or otherwise manipulate her main character in real life.
  Ernest Hemingway used to write his books standing up in front of a Royal typewriter suitably placed on a tall bookshelf. This typewriter, still on its bookshelf, is kept in Finca Vigía, Hemingway's Havana house (now a museum), where he lived until 1960, the year before his death.
  J. R. R. Tolkien was likewise accustomed to typing from awkward positions: "balancing his typewriter on his attic bed, because there was no room on his desk". In his Foreword to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien stated that "the whole story ... had to be typed, and re-typed: by me; the cost of professional typing by the ten-fingered was beyond my means."
  Jack Kerouac, a fast typist at 100 words per minute, typed On the Road on a roll of paper so he would not be interrupted by having to change the paper. Within two weeks of starting to write On the Road, Kerouac had one single-spaced paragraph, 120 feet long. Some scholars say the scroll was shelf paper; others contend it was a Thermo-fax roll; another theory is that the roll consisted of sheets of architect's paper taped together. His rapid work earned the famous rebuke from Truman Capote, "That's not writing, it's typing."
  Another fast typist of the Beat Generation was Richard Brautigan, who said that he thought out the plots of his books in detail beforehand, then typed them out at speeds approaching 90 to 100 words a minute.
  Tom Robbins waxed philosophical about the Remington SL3, a typewriter that he bought to write Still Life with Woodpecker. He eventually did away with it because it is too complicated and inhuman for the writing of poetry.
  After completing the novel Beautiful Losers, Leonard Cohen is said to have flung his typewriter into the Aegean Sea.
  Don Marquis purposely used the limitations of a typewriter (or more precisely, a particular typist) in his archy and mehitabel series of newspaper columns, which were later compiled into a series of books. According to his literary conceit, a cockroach named "Archy" was a reincarnated free-verse poet, who would type articles overnight by jumping onto the keys of a manual typewriter. The writings were typed completely in lower case, because of the cockroach's inability to generate the heavy force needed to operate the shift key. The lone exception is the poem "CAPITALS AT LAST" from archys life of mehitabel, written in 1933.
  Author Ray Bradbury used a typewriter for rent at the library to write his work known as Fahrenheit 451, which was published in 1953.
  Actor Tom Hanks uses and collects manual typewriters.
caption: William Faulkner's Underwood Universal Portable sits in his office at Rowan Oak, which is now maintained by the University of Mississippi in Oxford as a museum.
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