The Happy Hooker: My Own Story

Xaviera Hollander · Robin Moore · Yvonne Dunleavy

Jul 2011 · Harper Collins

About this ebook

The thirtieth anniversary edition of one of the modern classics of the sexual revolution—with a new Afterword by the author.

How did you first learn about sex? If you grew up in the 1970s, it may have been from a gleefully lusty tour guide named Xaviera Hollander.

In the late 1960s—that era of sexual chaos, when Playboy Clubs and love-ins were competing for national attention—a beautiful, intelligent young Dutch secretary named Xaviera de Vries moved to New York, grew swiftly tired of her desk job . . . and soon became the most visible and glamorous madam the city had ever seen. As Xaviera Hollander, she published a shockingly candid account of her life behind the brothel door. The Happy Hooker shot straight to the top of the bestseller lists, sold more than fifteen million copies, and made this enterprising young woman an international phenomenon.

Thirty years later, these delightfully explicit tales of the ’60s and ’70s swingers’ scene—including countless jaw-dropping stories of lesbianism, bondage, fetishism, and more—remain as titillating as ever, charged with the mix of shrewd observation and uninhibited appetite that made Hollander an irresistible storyteller. The Happy Hooker is a classic: the world’s greatest book on the world’s oldest profession.

Ratings and reviews

This book was the first book regarding sex I've ever thumbed through. I may have been about 8 or 9 years old. Answered a lot of questions and gave me an introduction to sex that last on, I learned to appreciate.

My grandpa once said you had to read bad literature to appreciate the good literature, then he handed me a copy of this book. I loved every page of it.

Taught me so much as a young teenager growing up in the 60's!

About the author

Xaviera Hollander's first book, The Happy Hooker, was published in 1972; since then it has been translated into fifteen languages and sold millions of copies around the world. Hollander began writing the column Call Me Madam in Penthouse that same year -- a role she fulfills to this day -- and has been named the magazine's most popular columnist. Now a promoter of the arts in her native Holland and the author of more than a dozen books, she divides her time between Spain and Amsterdam.