Victim of the Sexual Revolution.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Author Terry Southern

Terry Southern's telling trip from hipster to has-been

Just how cool was the writer Terry Southern in the 1960s? That's him on the cover of Sgt. Peppers, for God's sake, sporting Italian shades and flanked by the likes of Lenny Bruce, Marlon Brando, and W.C. Fields. As journalist Lee Hill makes clear in his engaging and competent biography, A Grand Guy: The Art and Life of Terry Southern (HarperCollins), the '60s were relentlessly good to Southern, best known today for his screenwriting work on Dr. Strangelove, Easy Rider, and other signature films of the decade.

His success was a long time coming. After serving in Europe during World War II, Southern developed a minor reputation in the '50s as an occasional contributor to acclaimed small mags such as Paris Review and the Evergreen Review, as the author of the wicked novel Flash and Filigree (think Nathanael West in an L.A. plastic surgery office) and, most notably, as the coauthor of Candy, a notoriously banned "db" (dirty book) published by Maurice Girodias' legendary Olympia Press (the same Parisian house that originally put Lolita and Naked Lunch into print).

It was only in the '60s that Southern, already approaching middle age in a decade that fetishized youth, fully came into his own as a countercultural hipster. By penning darkly subversive novels such as The Magic Christian and screenplays for films such as Dr. Strangelove, he helped to create an America energized by newfound sexual liberation, urbane coolness, and casual iconoclasm. Indeed, though he is largely ignored today, it is tempting to say that he was the dominant American writer of the decade. Certainly no other author playing at what Southern sarcastically referred to as the "Quality Lit Game" managed to have more simultaneous critical and commercial success in fiction, journalism, and, above all, screenwriting.

The '60s saw the American publication of The Magic Christian, which had appeared earlier in England to rave reviews; the above-ground re-release of Candy, the smart and smutty update of Candide that went on to become a massive bestseller and cultural touchstone; and highly regarded reportorial forays for Esquire and other glossies. (His "Twirling at Ole Miss," an absurdist account of campus life at the University of Mississippi, remains one of the seminal texts of what later came to be lionized as the New Journalism.) As the cowriter of films such as Dr. Strangelove, The Loved One, Barbarella, and Easy Rider...