Terry Southern: AMERICAN GROTESQUE

Alert! Alert! Scholarly study of Terry’s Southern’s oeuvre now available!

Nearly a decade in the making, American Grotesque lyrically examines Terry Southern’s literary output, from the well-known novels, stories and screenplays to lesser-known, unpublished/unproduced works, offering the first comprehensive examination of the career of this major American writer.

Tully, in a style uniquely graceful and readable in academe, reveals in rich detail the timeless themes running through Southern’s writing, including his Hawthornesque connection to nature, surrealist influences, the jazz dimensions, Poe's satiric influence, and Southern's emergence as a comic master of the Grotesque. AMERICAN GROTESQUE also examines the influence on Southern of some of his key friends and collaborators, including George Plimpton, Kurt Vonnegut, Henry Green, Stanley Kubrick, the Rolling Stones, Lenny Bruce, Jean Cocteau and the Beatles.

The rich eras in which Southern's life takes shape are also explored: 1930s Texas, post-war Paris, New York’s ‘Quality Lit’ crowd, and swinging London. Tully highlights themes that link such diverse projects as Dr. Strangelove, Candy, Easy Rider, The Loved One, The Magic Christian, and many previously unexamined works of Terry Southern, including unpublished stories, plays and screenplays. Tully delves deeply into Southern's work across a variety of genres, and reveals it to be of a consistent, cohesive vision. Beautifully written and compelling, this book elevates Southern into the pantheon of Great American Writers — worthy of being taught in schools and studied in virtually any modern discipline. — Nile Southern

Introduction, by Nile Southern

After my father died in 1995, I inherited forty boxes of papers and his bewildering legacy. The fact that Terry’s reputation had morphed at some point from disciplined writer to popular culture ‘pied-piper’ hadn’t helped him during his lifetime, and wasn’t helping me keep him in bookstores, either. Through the publication of a new anthology, Now Dig This; The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern 1950-1995, and the letters-driven The CANDY Men; The Rollicking Life and Times of the Notorious Novel, Candy, my efforts to draw attention to the wide range and serious nature of much of my father’s work was critically well-received, but did not resolve the unstated underlying puzzle: ‘Who was Terry Southern?’ Rather, they bolstered the accepted axiom that Terry was a man who could write just about anything, and had been everywhere that mattered. David Tully takes us beyond the awe-struck, which is where most Terry Southern observers, including myself, have been, and casts us into the hagiography of his soul—where Terry Southern’s life and oeuvre meet in a place uniquely determined by his times.

As Tully brilliantly reveals, what my father left behind was an extraordinary body of work reflecting a seriousness, depth, and world-view whose lineage of high-level Decadence, Grotesquery, and Satire has historically been marginalized—precisely because it is, at its sharpest, culturally critical, and, as former Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham observes, “a tragic view of human nature…that simply does not sell.” As Terry’s Executor, what mystified me most was not just the seemingly instant academic bias against the “pop-culture” successes of Candy and his film work—as if that somehow made him less of an artist than his novel-writing compatriots who didn’t achieve such pop-art breakthroughs—but the fact that Terry didn’t fit into any neat categories that institutions typically need to amplify or fill in their collections: ‘novelist’, ‘essayist’, ‘screenwriter,’ ‘journalist,’ ‘humorist.’ Terry fulfilled each of these categories with confidence and a style all his own, but because of that, I suspect, he fell through the cracks—as he continues to do today. Rather than identify Terry Southern as a ‘keystone species’ of American Studies and post-war American Lit—my father tends to be mentioned as an eccentric literary adjunct to the Beat Generation, the Gonzos, or the ‘literary outlaw’ of the Paris Review set. To me, and to those who have long taken his work seriously, he’s the bridge between the Beats and the Beatles; the link between Poe and Kubrick. It’s a sad reflection on our times that such fluidity for a writer should be considered a detriment—as opposed to a model for the hybridized new media scribes of today.

Read the complete introduction to Terry Southern and the American Grotesque ...