Marilyn Monroe loved reading

Many people misunderstand Marilyn Monroe for being blonde and dumb. But in fact, she loved to read and was a bookworm. Monroe has quite a collection of books. She had more than 400 books in her collection at the time of her death. She was particularly fond of images that showed her reading out of the many that were shot of her.

A filmmaker once inquired about her selection of R.M. Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet after spotting her reading it. Marilyn Monroe explained to him that she frequented the Pickwick bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard on nights when she had nothing else to do: "And I just open books at random—or when I come to a page or a paragraph I like, I buy that book. So last night I bought this one. Is that wrong?".

The walls of her library were filled with literary, artistic, dramatic, biographies, poetic, political, historical, theological, philosophical, and psychological works. Her personal copy of On the Road by Jack Kerouac, The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, and This House on Fire by William Styron were among the First Editions. Numerous more classic authors, from Tolstoy to Twain, were represented, including her copies of The Great Gatsby, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Dubliners by James Joyce, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, and The Fall by Albert Camus. Her library also included volumes on gardening, her Bibles, and children's literature, including a copy of The Little Engine That Could that might have been annotated in a young girl's handwriting.