Playboy has a perhaps surprisingly strong literary background, publishing works by authors including John Irving, John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov and Margaret Atwood. This summer, literary editor Amy Grace Loyd acquired first serial rights in Vladimir Nabokov's final, unfinished novel The Original of Laura for its December issue. It has also enjoyed a lengthy relationship with King, interviewing the author back in 1983.

"The protagonist of Salem's Lot, a struggling young author with a resemblance to his creator, confesses at one point, 'Sometimes when I'm lying in bed at night, I make up a Playboy Interview about me. Waste of time. They only do authors if their books are big on campus.' Ten novels and several million dollars in the bank later, your books are big on campus and everywhere else," the interviewer said to King.

The author replied that the passage reflected his state of mind in the days before he sold his first book, Carrie, when nothing seemed to be going right. "When I couldn't sleep, in that black hole of the night when all your doubts and fears and insecurities surge in at you, snarling, from the dark -- what the Scandinavians call the wolf hour -- I used to lie in bed alternately wondering if I shouldn't throw in the creative towel and spinning out masturbatory wish fulfilment fantasies in which I was a successful and respected author. And that's where my imaginary Playboy interview came in," he said.