19 Authors and Their Typewriters

In the more than 100 years between the widespread introduction of the typewriter and the rise of the word processor, a great many masterpieces have been produced on the handy office machines. Some of those machines are still around, and some are still in use.

1. L. FRANK BAUM

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz author used a Smith Premier model typewriter. The LC Smith typewriter company would merge with the Corona typewriter company in 1926, and is now known as Smith-Corona.

2. ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Manual Typewriter black Best Price: $124.99 Buy New $162.99 (as of 03:25 UTC - Details) The Farewell to Arms writer used a number of typewriter models in his career, including a Corona #3, a Corona #4, an Underwood Noiseless Portable, and a 1932 Royal Model P that was later discovered to have photo negatives underneath it (when restored, they showed a young Hemingway with his family at their cottage in Walloon Lake, Michigan). His favorite, though, was a Royal Quiet Deluxe.

3. ORSON WELLES

The screenwriter and director wrote Citizen Kane on his portable manual Underwood typewriter, which had his name and Paris address painted on the case. It now belongs to typewriter collector Steve Soboroff.

4. JACK LONDON

Jack London, the author of The Call of the Wild, had a Columbia Bar-Lock 10 typewriter that featured separate keyboards with different characters, which he used during his time as a war correspondent—but it was his second wife, Charmian, who used a Remington Standard Typewriter No.7 to type his (very messy) handwritten prose. “If typewriters hadn’t been invented by the time I began to write,” London reportedly once said, “I doubt if the world would ever have heard of Jack London. No one would have had the patience to read more than a page of my longhand!”

5. DR. SEUSS

The Green Eggs and Ham author’s favorite typewriter was a Smith-Corona portable.

6. MARK TWAIN

Remington Typewriter Company via the University of Virginia Library // Public Domain

Twain purchased his first typewriter—most likely a Sholes & Glidden treadle model—in 1874, then upgraded to a Remington No. 2 typewriter, which was introduced in 1878. He claimed in his 1904 autobiography to have written the manuscript for Tom Sawyer on a typewriter, the first ever manuscript to be typed. But most historians think that his book Life on the Mississippi, published in 1882, was actually the first manuscript submitted to a publisher in typed form. It is generally believed that Twain gave up typing years earlier and had his books typed by an assistant.

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