HAD A LIBRARY
Most will have seen the photo of Monroe standing over a subway grate, but it is likely that few will have pictured her sitting, reading a book. She had a core collection of 400 that moved with her and had collected many more.
Monroe, who died 64 years ago, would have turned 100 this year. She is the subject of a new book which is about her books rather than her body. Information about, Marilyn and Her Books: The Literary Life of Marilyn Monroe, by Gail Crowther, is easily found on Amazon and the London Public Library has ordered an audio and a print copy. To help you determine if you should buy or borrow this book, here are some reviews.
1. “Books Are a Star’s Best Friend: The Little-known Reading Habits of a Hollywood Icon,” Noah Isenberg, The American Scholar, May 28, 2026.
"Her sex appeal proved inescapable, but Monroe was far more than just a pin-up; she was fiercely intelligent, ambitious, and savvy in her professional life. Author Gail Crowther, whose previous subjects include Dorothy Parker, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, shifts the focus to this formerly neglected terrain in her highly illuminating, jauntily-paced Marilyn and Her Books: The Literary Life of Marilyn Monroe....
"On set, Monroe was known to carry her prized possessions with her—when making All About Eve (1950), she brought with her to the set a copy of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. She was especially fond of verse and owned numerous volumes by various poets from Shakespeare, Milton, and García Lorca to Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marjorie Tilden, and Heinrich Heine. “I read poetry to save time,” she once remarked with the kind of playful, witty nonchalance she often exhibited on screen...."
"Crowther makes abundantly clear that Monroe was far more than the “dumb blonde” or Hollywood sexpot she was all too often made out to be. Marilyn and Her Books offers a more nuanced, complex narrative and is a powerful corrective to received wisdom—arguing convincingly, on the eve of Monroe’s centennial, that she must be “recast and reimagined: not the late, not the ditzy, not the bombshell, not the difficult, but the intelligent Marilyn Monroe.”
2. "Some Like It Literary: How Marilyn Monroe Gave a Smart Gloss to Her Image," Alexandra Jacobs, New York Times, May 24, 2026.
"In MARILYN AND HER BOOKS: The Literary Life of Marilyn Monroe (Gallery, 290 pp., $30), Gail Crowther attempts to debunk Monroe’s dumb-blonde reputation through the Murphy door of her private library...."
"It is refreshing to contemplate Monroe as reader, for as muse she has been stretched thinner than the diaphanous scarves in a Bert Stern photo. Someone so holographic is far more humanized by what was on her shelves than by some rotten rouge or the moth-eaten, Kardashian-appropriated frocks from her closet....
"She dined on oysters and champagne with Carson McCullers and Isak Dinesen, who likened her to a lion cub; and summited with Edith Sitwell, who remarked that “in repose her face was at moments strangely, prophetically tragic, like the face of a beautiful ghost. A little spring-ghost, an innocent fertility daemon, the vegetation spirit that was Ophelia...."
“She showed an interest in intellectual subjects which was, to say the least, disconcerting,” remarked the acidulous George Sanders, who appeared with her in “All About Eve.” “She was somebody in a play not yet written.”
3. "Marilyn Monroe Read books. A Lot of Them," Mark Judge, Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, April 30, 2026.
"That’s the revelation of Marilyn and Her Books: The Literary Life of Marilyn Monroe, a fascinating new volume by Gail Crowther. It isn’t a grasping-at-straws attempt to make Monroe a literary figure based on her love of a few good novels. Crowther has done her research, itemizing the books Monroe owned when she died, finding receipts for books she bought at the Ivy Bookstore in Los Angeles, and going through old letters in which Monroe discussed her favorite books. Monroe was a reader, which may explain why she was drawn to one of her husbands, the playwright Arthur Miller—a man who made his living with words...."
"Most of Monroe’s books went to private collectors. One anonymous woman from Boston purchased five of her books and then donated them to the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The books were each written by an American woman: My Ántonia and Lucy Gayheart by Willa Cather; The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker; The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers; and The Little Disturbances of Man, a collection of short stories by Grace Paley. In January 2000, the library put the books on public display, and the then-acting director, Jane Knowles, said, “We are thrilled to receive these books from the library of Marilyn Monroe. This just goes to prove that there was more to Marilyn Monroe than the movie star and popular icon. She was also a reader. We are delighted to add her books to those of other illustrious women at the Schlesinger Library.”
Many of Monroe's items, including some books, can be seen on Julien's Auctions. Toynbee's, A Study of History, sold for almost $4000.
For a related post about women book collectors see, "Women and Books".
