February 1965 issue

You can’t judge a magazine by its title — not always.
William Faulkner wrote a piece for Sports Illustrated; James Agee frequently wrote for Fortune.

Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson were regular contributors to Rolling Stone.

And the number of literary giants whose works have appeared in Playboy are staggering.
The list certainly competes with The New Yorker.

Here are just a few of the authors published in Playboy: Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow, Kurt Vonnegut, and Isaac B. Singer.

And lest one thinks only the pens-in-the-hands-of-men wrote for Playboy there’s Nadine Gordimer, Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, and Anne Sexton.

Playboy’s literary heyday was the 1950s through the mid-1970s.
You can read about this period from a collector’s perspective at the blog: Inherited Values.
It’s written by Cliff Aliperti.

September 1966 issue