Take a Dip: Literary Greats In Their Bathing Suits

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[Editor’s note: Your devoted Flavorwire team is taking Memorial Day off, but we’ve left you with some of our favorite summer-related features that you may have missed the first time around. This post originally ran June 26, 2011. Enjoy!]

We don’t know about you, but now that it’s officially summertime, we want to spend as much time in our bathing suits as humanly possible, and so, it seems, did many of our favorite writers. After all, even the moodiest of authors needs a little sunshine now and again to chase the pain away. Whether that works or not is a whole other story. Click through for our gallery of literary greats in their bathing suits, but be warned — they’re not all pin-up shots. Sure, Sylvia and Anne are bathing beauties in addition to being quality wordsmiths, but old Ernest looks decidedly doughy around the edges. Oh well, he had other talents. All we wonder is, what were they reading on the beach?

Sylvia Plath [via]

Anne Sexton [via]

Ernest Hemingway [via]

F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald [via]

Hunter S. Thompson [via]

Eugene O’Neill (and wife Carlotta Monterey), 1931 [via]

Tennessee Williams, 1947 [via]

Truman Capote (over there on the right), 1949 [via]

Virginia Woolf and Clive Bell [via]

Peter Orlovsky, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs (in the suit), 1957 [via]