Penelope Ashe is a fictional writer. In 1969, Penelope Ash was credited as the writer of the novel Naked Came the Stranger, which became a bestseller. Later that year, it was revealed that the book was a hoax that was really written by a group of twenty-four journalists led by Mike McGrady. The journalists had the goal of deliberately writing a terrible book that contained a lot of sex in order to show that popular American literary culture had become mindlessly vulgar. As a bestseller, the hoax was successful, and the novel increased in popularity with the revelation.