Writers Where They Work

Helen Gurley Brown, the longtime editor of Cosmopolitan magazine and author of books including “Sex and the Single Girl,” at home in New York in 1979. In a 2012 opinion essay for The New York Times, Jamie Brickhouse recalled that Brown was “thoroughly modern, but not contemporary when it came to email. Letters — typed or handwritten — were her preferred way of communicating.”

In 1982, the photographer Derek Hudson met Tennessee Williams at a bar in Key West. Williams agreed to be photographed the next day. The playwright was pictured in his study, where a white Olympia typewriter sits surrounded by papers, a Tiffany lamp, pill bottles and a glass of wine. “This was perhaps one of the saddest encounters I have had,” wrote Hudson.

Richard Wright at the typewriter in an undated photo.

William S. Burroughs smoking and writing in Paris, 1962. As Burroughs recounted, his pal Jack Kerouac typed part of the original manuscript of “Naked Lunch” in 1957. “He started and he was a marvelous typist and he typed … about….. well, I don’t know, 40 or 50 pages, quite a bit.”

Erica Ackerberg is the photo editor at the Book Review.