Who are

The CANDY Men...
Terry Southern (1924-1995) began writing satiric, outrageous fiction at the age of 12, when he rewrote Edgar Allen Poe stories "because they didn't go far enough". After serving in the Army as a Lieutenant in World War II, he wrote short stories while studying at the Sorbonne. "The Accident," published in the premier issue of The Paris Review, was the first short story to appear in that magazine. He admired and befriended British novelist Henry Greene, who convinced Andre Deutch to publish his first novel, Flash and Filigree (1958). Residing with his first wife Carol in Geneva, he spent days conjuring surrealistic exploits for trillionaire trickster "Grand Guy Guy Grand" in The Magic Christian (1959) while at the same time writing Candy (1960) for Maurice Girodias' Olympia Press. He and Gregory Corso presented Naked Lunch to Girodias, convincing him to publish it. He published numerous short stories in England, France and America, (anthologized in Red Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes), and co-edited Writers in Revolt (1962) with Alex Trocci and Richard Seaver. After settling in an old farmhouse in East Canaan, Connecticut, Stanley Kubrick, upon the recommedation of Peter Sellers, invited him to employ a satirical touch to Dr. Strangelove (1964).

A rewarding period in Hollywood followed, includng writing dialog for the films: The Loved One (1965), The Collector, The Cincinatti Kid (1966), Casino Royale and Barbarella (1967). Terry helped launch the Independent film movement by co-authoring Easy Rider (1968), and co-producing The End Of The Road (1969), filmed entirely on-location in the Berkshires. After the quiet publication of Blue Movie (1970), he turned to screenwriting full-time, working on original scripts, adaptations, and speculative assignments throughout the 70s and 80s--using his Berkshire home as a base, with longtime companion, Gail Gerber. During this difficult period, when films and "quality-lit" (a phrase he coined) moved from tome to blockbuster, the IRS repeatedly attempted to reclaim unpaid taxes from the mid-1960s. He was hired in the early 1980s by Michael O'Donohough to write for Saturday Night Live, and wrote The Telephone (1986) with singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson. With legitimate film work increasingly elusive, Terry taught Screenwriting at both NYU and Columbia University from the late 80s until his death. His last novel, Texas Summer, was released by Richard Seaver in 1992. His novels; The Magic Christian, Flash and Filigree, Blue Movie and Candy are available through Grove Atlantic, and a new collection of works; NOW DIG THIS; The Unspeakable Terry Southern, 1950–1995 is available from Grove Press.
Mason Hoffenberg: Born in December 1922 in NYC to a well-to-do Jewish family, Mason was sent to military academy. He dropped out, to the dismay of his parents, Isidore, a business-oriented self-made man, and Minerva, who exclaimed, "What are we going to do with the uniform?"!

He attended progressive Olivet College, was drafted in 1944, and was sent to England in the Air Force. He was in France and Belgium, and in Germany as part of the occupation army. He had good self-deprecatory stories about WWII, such as setting fire to the base with a cigarette butt, being arrested as a German spy, and rolling in collective vomit at sea.

Conquered by Europe, Mason returned to France on the GI bill and registered at The Sorbonne. Travelling back and forth to NY, he lived at The Alden and decided to become a writer and part of the hip Greenwich Village scene. It was during that time that he met lifelong friends Anton Rosenberg and Stanley Gould, and roommate Jimmy Baldwin, the latter ever successful with… girls.

A French marriage in 1953 and children settled him in Paris. He belonged to the Vie de Café and American expat scene with characters such as Kerouac, Corso, and Burroughs, in what would be known as the Beat movement. With a pool of authors including Terry Southern, he wrote for the Olympia Press and worked at the Agence France Presse.

In addition to Candy, he was known for his novels Until She Screams and Sin For Breakfast, published by Olympia Press.

He first met with Bob Dylan and Marianne Faithful in 1962. When his marriage broke up, he moved to London, hanging out with the pop crowd, and befriending Yoko Ono and Mick Jagger.

In the late sixties, Mason returned to the States, settling between New York City and Woodstock. Never short of friends, romance, and standing invitations, he stayed in Los Angeles for a while, the only person there without a car, and spent long periods of time in Mallorca, Spain. Upon his mother’s death in 1978, he returned permanently to his native Manhattan.

He died of cancer in June, 1986, with his family near him.
Maurice Girodias founded the Olympia Press in Paris in 1953. His father, Jack Kahane, had published such luminaries as Henry Miller, Anais Nin, James Joyce, Frank Harris, and Lawrence Durrell under his own Obelisk imprint in the 1930's. After World War II, Girodias began to accumulate a crew of American and British writers living in Paris to produce what became know as "dirty books" under his Traveller's Companion series. These small green paperbacks were written in English and sold mainly to American servicemen and tourists who helped to "distribute" them throughout the world.

But mixed in with the erotic titles were works which were to become some of the most important literature in the post-war era. J.P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man, Pauline Reage's Story of O, William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch, Terry Southern's and Mason Hoffenberg's Candy, works by Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, Raymond Queneau, Jean Genet, and Georges Bataille rounded out the Olympia list.

Girodias was also the first to publish Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. The twp had a long running feud over the book, some of which was played out in the pages of Evergreen.

Girodias' article, "Lolita, Nabokov and I" was first published in Evergreen in September of 1965 (#37). Nabokov replied in Evergreen #45 (1967) in his article "Lolita and Mr. Girodias." Girodias had the last word in his Letter to the Editor, June 1967 (#47).

After the censorship barriers were broken in the U.S. and in Europe, Griodias moved Olympia to New York City where it remained until its demise in 1973. Maurice Girodias died in 1990.

Evergreen Review on M. Girodias:

http://www.evergreenreview.com/101/articles/mgirodias.html
Nile Southern, (b. 1960), began his writing career in elementary school, penning such short works as “The Abominable Snowman Versus The Giant Wasp,” and “Headmaster’s Head.” Son of Terry Southern, he began making films with his father, by appearing in them as an actor, at age eight. Nile began making his own films in high-school, and received a special filmmaking award from Choate-Rosemary Hall. He later studied film at the UCLA and NYU film departments. He has published in, and been an editor for, Black Ice (Fiction Collective), Open City and O-blek.

His ode to the East Village of the 1980s, Art War, appeared in o-blek's Writings from the New Coast, and his Cargo of Blasted Mainframes appeared in Black Ice. Nile has worked as a film editor and assistant for Pablo Ferro, D.A. Pennebaker and Jonas Mekas. As a filmmaker, his work includes a series of portrait films commissioned by New Yorker cartoonists, and an opening sequence for Mark Amerika's Grammatron, which appeared in the Whitney Biennial. Nile became a trainer for the Montage Picture Processor in New York City—a non-linear film editing machine favored by Stanley Kubrick and Francis Coppola. The experience of working after-hours on the machine inspired a 'screen based narrative' The Anarchivists of Eco-Dub; A Novel of Convergence', which is to be published this summer by Alt-X books.

After his father’s death in 1995, Nile became the Executor of the Terry Southern Estate—which was mired in debt and copyright disarray. After seven years of probate, Nile helped secure the New York Public Library’s acquisition of his father’s archive, and a movie development deal concerning Terry’s literary properties with film director Steven Soderbergh.

Nile is the co-editor of Now Dig This; The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern; 1950-1995, and author of The CANDY Men, The Rollicking Life and Times of the Notorious Novel, CANDY.

The Anarchivists of Eco-Dub will be published by Alt-X Books based in Boulder, Colorado, summer, 2004.

In November 2015, ANTIBOOKCLUB.com published Yours in Haste and Adoration: Selected Letters of Terry Southern.

 

He is executor of the Terry Southern Literary Trust, and maintains the Terry Southern website, www.terrysouthern.com.

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