Describing Terry Southern as a pop writer? Yeah, I guess so and more is the pity.

The best of the post-beat generation writers, he was a modern day Swift. "Candy" was a beautiful Swiftian take on Voltaire's Candide that he sort of knocked off on the side as he wrote the story and screenplay for "Dr. Strangelove." Simply amazing amount of talent. He also wrote the screenplay for "Easy Rider" but agreed to share the credit with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper. But if you are a TS fan, Jack Nicholson's speech around the campfire about Venus is pure Terry Southern.

Everything he did was done with an ironic twist.....or ten. His contributions became the standard of style and made him famous enough to be one of the folks on the front of the Beatles Sgt. Pepper album. The anarchistic and obscene blended with the ironic. Terry Southern changed the entire landscape of American writing and in the doing so becmae lost himself. Everybody to some degree now imitates parts of Terry Southern while he is relegated back to the background as a pop writer. Truth is that Terry Southern was (died in the mid 90's) and is a bigger influence on American writing and writers than Steinbeck or Hemmingway and a classic piece of satire like "Candy" is sadly only thought of as a cheap porn novel.

Spaw