The Underwood Typewriter

Recently I stumbled across a photo on a social media site. The image was of a home telephone, not the old rotary dial, but the art deco style with bulky neon buttons; cutting edge stuff for 1987. The poster of this photo was a 20 year old girl and the caption read: “I must have one of these antique phones.”

I died a little bit inside, my silent weeping an ode to the hourglass of life’s refusal to pause.

As I type on a magical electronic square that transmits my thoughts to the world in a nanosecond, I cannot help but imagine how fast the rotations must be as generations of writers are undoubtedly rolling over in their clichéd graves. The mere notion that the current mode of crafting the next great American novel requires a battery would surely not sit well with the Hemingway’s of the world. Though tragically hip in the same fashion that vinyl is still the preferred medium of sound to die-hards, the typewriter has effectively met its demise in writer heaven. But once upon a time, a word technician was required to be a mechanic. Mistakes came with no backspace button and spell check was a tattered dictionary next to a glass of Scotch. The stroke of a key was followed by a triumphant clack, as ink met paper in a beautiful crash.

The Underwood Typewriter was the glorious vehicle that drove the words from the recess of the mind to their physical enshrinement.

Upton Sinclair, who TIME Magazine called “A man with every gift except humor and silence”, wrote his culture shifting The Jungle on an Underwood. William Faulkner employed his trusty metal companion as he was shaping the Southern Literature movement; following him on an Underwood (as well as the genre) was To Kill a Mockingbird scribe Harper Lee ( who incidentally included a character named "Mr. Underwood"  who is known to type on a typewriter all day long). And the brash, lovable “Laureate of American lowlife” Charles Bukowski was well known to fire away on his Underwood Standard when not preoccupied with his cats or bottles of vino.

  “The Buyer takes on an ominous grey-green color. Fact is his body is making its own junk or equivalent. The Buyer has a steady connection. A Man Within you might say. Or so he thinks. 'I'll just set in my room,' he says. 'F**k 'em all. Squares on both sides. I am the only complete man in the industry.”- Naked Lunch

William S. Burroughs, the enigmatic Beat wordsmith, was known as a repeat pawn customer, going through a myriad of typewriters to support his lifestyle. The preceding excerpt from his seminal Naked Lunch was written on a borrowed Underwood from fellow Beat iconoclast Jack Kerouac. Kerouac used his Underwood Portable to pen a little piece known as On The Road. 

From Douglas Fairbanks to John F. Kennedy, the New York based Underwood Typewriter Company has, for over 100 years, manufactured the strictly utilitarian machines that compute the emotional narrative of our lives. In modern times the contraption has emerged as poetic as the prose it fabricates. Though painful to use the term, for the generations that are not impassioned towards the nostalgic, Underwood has had its share of cameos in pop culture. Film buffs might recognize Leo DiCaprio’s character in Catch Me If You Can as he forged counterfeit checks on a classic Underwood. An Underwood typewriter is used by the main character in the 2001 musical film Moulin Rouge. On the small screen, the clever character in the television show Murder, She Wrote began her writing career using an Underwood Typewriter; on Parks and Recreation, eternally old school man’s man Ron Swanson finds and restores an Underwood No.5. The legendary brand has even appeared in the mind numbing realm of gaming, as Underwood is integral to the plot of a video game entitled BioShock.

But at its heart, Underwood belongs to an era where only the finest Literary Fiction was worthy of our attention. And to many purists, this is the perfect climax. In a saturated world where hormonal teenaged vampires outsell Dickens, perhaps the prestige of an Underwood Typewriter should only be paired to literature of merit. To envision the iconic device being used to produce grocery aisle romance camp is more excruciating than watching the aforementioned Alexander Graham Bell masterpiece become relegated to a curious relic.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote it best. And he wrote it on an Underwood.

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

 –The Great Gatsby