Five Books Marilyn Monroe Read

June 1, 2026. Marilyn Monroe would have turned one hundred. The image is still everywhere: blown-up prints, gallery walls, licensing deals. Most people know the face. Fewer know what she read.

Gail Crowther, a writer who has spent years tracking Monroe's reading habits, filed a piece this week for AnOther Magazine. Five books. Actual titles, actual annotations. Not the blonde myth, but the person who underlined sentences in Ulysses and kept a copy of The Brothers Karamazov near her bedside.

The List

Crowther names five: Ulysses by James Joyce, The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky, The Fall by Albert Camus, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, and To the Actor by Michael Chekhov (Anton's nephew, also an acting teacher). Monroe's personal library held over 400 books at the time of her death in 1962. These five show up in photographs of her apartment, in interviews, in handwritten notes.

Ulysses was annotated. Crowther writes that Monroe underlined passages about Molly Bloom, Joyce's character who closes the novel with a long interior monologue. The Brothers Karamazov was a gift from her third husband, Arthur Miller. She read Camus in the original French, reportedly carrying La Chute during the filming of The Misfits.

Kerouac's On the Road landed in her hands in 1957, two years after publication. Crowther notes that Monroe was drawn to the book's restlessness, its refusal to settle. To the Actor was a working text. Monroe studied under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio in New York; Chekhov's book was required reading there.

The Angle

The piece isn't about Monroe as a reader in the abstract. It's about specific objects: books she owned, pages she marked, titles she mentioned by name. Crowther pulls from auction records, estate inventories, and interviews Monroe gave in the late 1950s. The forensic work is the piece.

What registers is the gap between the image and the inventory. Monroe spent decades being photographed. She also spent decades reading Russian literature and underlining Joyce. Both are true. Only one made it into the mythology.