One needs a typewriter to type out a story; but one needs a story to tell, first.
Alice Denham, Playboy magazine’s Playmate of the Month in July 1956; photo undated, but probably about the same time; from 20th Century Man
I haven’t been able to identify the typewriter. A short story she wrote appeared in the same issue of Playboy as her playmate layout.
Denham led an adventurous life in the New York literary scene, as an aspiring writer, and as a woman who liked sex. Was she working on her book in this photo? It was eventually published in 1967, My Darling from the Lions.
In 2006 she got attention for another book, a tell-much memoir of her life and romances and flings along the way, Sleeping With Bad Boys – A Juicy Tell-All of Literary New York in the Fifties and Sixties, good enough, or historically interesting enough, to get a review in the New York Times.
If typewriters could talk, you know?
More:
- The Typewriter (hellotypewriter.wordpress.com)
- Return of Typewriters Changing History (techzwn.com)
- Typewriter Keys (artfulinclinations.wordpress.com)
- Old-tech typewriters are making a comeback (nbcnews.com)
- Ode to the typewriter harks back to the days of slow (teleread.com)
- Typewriter patterns (meganprice.typepad.com)
- Some guy on Imgur made a nice pencil drawing from the photo
- Even later Alice Denham writing — she’s still typing on!
- UPDATE: Telegraph blogger Tim Wong posted this photograph on National Smokers Day, February 5 (2014, if I recall correctly) — then graciously corrected the error, but left the photo up as a tribute to Alice Denham, and to journalistic integrity; he had been misinformed the photo was of opera’s immortal Maria Callas
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 