The WAG interview
with Lee Hill

Interview with A Grand Guy
on altx.com

Lee Hill on END OF THE ROAD
— a 'lost' classic from 1970!

DINGBAT Magazine:

"Welcome to the Terry Southern Renaissance! Things are going to get hot for them now, whoever they are. They walk the earth by night; by day, they shop. Their number is legion."
— from the review, by Jim McMenamin

He was the hipster's hipster, the perfect icon of cool. A small-town Texan who disdained his "good ol' boy" roots, he bopped with the Beats, hobnobbed with Sartre and Camus, and called William Faulkner friend. He was considered one of the most creative and original players in the Paris Review Quality Lit Game, yet his greatest literary success was a semipornographic pulp novel. For decades, the crowd he ran with was composed of the most famous creative artists of the day. He wrote DR. STRANGELOVE with Stanley Kubrick, EASY RIDER with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, and worked on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE with a younger, louder breed of sacred cow torpedoers. He's a face in the crowd on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (the guy in sunglasses). Wherever the cultural action was, he was there, the life of every party--Paris in the '50s, London in the swinging '60s, Greenwich Village, and Big Bad Hollywood. Brilliant, dynamic, irrepressible, he enjoyed remarkable success and then squandered it with almost superhuman excess. There was, and ever will be, only one Terry Southern.

In a biography as vibrant and colorful as the life it celebrates, Lee Hill masterfully explores the high and low times of the unique, incomparable Terry Southern, one of the most genuine talents of this or any other age.

Illuminating, exhilarating, and sobering, it is an intimate portrait of an unequalled satirist and satyrist whose appetite for life was enormous and whose aim was sure and true as he took shots at consumerism, America's repressive political culture, upper-class amorality, and middle-class banality.

But more than simply the story of one man, here is a wide-screen, Technicolor view of a century in the throes of profound cultural change--from the first chilly blasts of the Cold War and McCarthyism to the Vietnam era and the Reagan years; from Miles and Kerouac to the Beatles, the Stones, and beyond. And always at the center of the whirlwind was Terry Southern—outrageous, unpredictable, charming, erudite, and eternally cool; a brazen innovator and unappreciated genius;
and most of all ,A GRAND GUY.

LEE HILL has written and reported on literature, film, music, and popular culture for Scenario, The Guardian, Neon, and other publications in Canada, England, and the United States for more than a decade. He is the author of Easy Rider, part of the British Film Institute's acclaimed Modern Classics series. He first interviewed Terry Southern in 1990, beginning a friendship that led to this book.

— from the publisher, Harper Collins

"[H]e was, in many respects, a kind of Hemingway figure for those of us who came of age in the Sixties and Seventies."
Lee Hill, The Wag Interview
Ain't It Cool.com interview with Nile Southern and Josh Alan Friedman about Now Dig This, and Lee Hill
Lee Hill writes on the famous 'lost' film, END OF THE ROAD — now available on DVD — click here for ordering information

Home