Terry Southern was the hipster's hipster, the perfect icon of cool. A small-town Texan, he disdained his roots and bopped with the Beats, hobnobbed with Sartre and Camus, and had William Faulkner for a friend. He was considered one of the most creative and original players writing for the "Paris Review", and yet his greatest literary success was the semipornographic pulp novel, "Candy". With screenwriting credits second to none (he wrote "Dr Strangelove" with Stanley Kubrick, "Easy Rider" with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, and worked on Saturday Night Live) and the author of such novels as "The Magic Christian" and "Blue Movie", Terry Southern created some of the most enduring landmarks of popular culture. He was friends with celebrities such as Lenny Bruce, William Burroughs, the Beatles (Southern is the one wearing glasses on the cover of Sgt. Pepper), the Rolling Stones, Stanley Kubrick, (he suggested the Kubrick film "A Clockwork Orange"), Dennis Hopper, Rip Torn, Larry Rivers and George Plimpton.
A veritable cultural time capsule, Southern's life was integral to the avant-garde on 1950s Paris, the Beat years, "swinging" London, Greenwich Village, literary New York and Big Bad Hollywood throughout the psychedelic 1960s. Brilliant, dynamic, irrepressible, he enjoyed remarkable success and then squandered it with almost superhuman excess. In this biography, Lee Hill explores the highs and lows of Terry Southern. It is an intimate portrait of an unequalled satirist, whose aim, as he took potshots at America's repressive political culture, upper-class amorality, and middle-class banality, was sure and true. "A Grand Guy" reveals the story of Terry Southern - outrageous, unpredictable, charming, erudite, eternally cool and one of the most enigmatic and fascinating characters from the latter half of the 20th century.