Introduction The Typewriter as an Agent of Change?

• Published in: The Typewriter Century p. 3
• Main Author: MARTYN LYONS
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: University of Toronto Press 01.02.2021
• ISBN: 9781487525736; 1487525737
• DOI: 10.3138/9781487537821-003

In 2006, when Larry McMurtry accepted the Golden Globe award for co-writing the screenplay of Brokeback Mountain, he thanked his typewriter (it was a Hermes 3000). In Colorado, Hunter S. Thompson, author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), took his typewriter out into the snow and shot it (and later himself).¹ Clearly the typewriter was not just a soulless machine; it had a persona, to be befriended, cherished, reviled, or murdered. Many writers treated their typewriter like a living creature, as did Paul Auster, who called his Olympia a “fragile, sentient being”:² “It was simply a tool that