Praise for Terry Southern and Candy "A comic pornographer with a profound moral sense . . . [Southern's prose] has a weirdly old-fashioned grace, like antique gold filigree, in which his radical new ideas glow like blood-red stones. An idea man unconfined by any ideologies, Southern is a sort of hip social anarchist."
--New York Times "Sex in America, after [
Candy], is not going to be the same . . . Southern is an absolutely first-rate writer . . . The work of a major satirist . . . Southern is holding up a triple-angled mirror to America in which, given a rudimentary sense of humor, we are enabled to see ourselves as we really are . . . When sex is a joyous fulfillment instead of a wasting affliction, people can see that the most hilarious event in the history of mankind was the division of the sexes. This is what Southern sees; and that is what
Candy says."
--Nelson Algren, Life "Reading the sexploitation-drenched novel
Candy . . . was one of the most physically uncomfortable experiences of my life. Uncomfortable, because no matter how I tried to shift my tush on the hard wooden chair I was sitting in, I couldn't avoid the awkward sensation of my own dripping panties. It really was that good . . . [A] satirical one-upmanship of Voltaire's
Candide."
--Vice "Terry Southern writes mean, cooly deliberate, and murderous prose . . . We may have at last found the rightful heir (saints protect me from sacrilege) of Nathaniel West."
--Norman Mailer "Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be."
--William Styron "Terry Southern was one of the first and best of the new wave of American writers, defining the cutting edge of black comedy."
--Joseph Heller "Terry Southern is the illegitimate son of Mack Sennett and Edna Saint Vincent Millay."
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. "Terry Southern's fiction, in short form or long, is a national treasure."
--Bruce Jay Friedman "Terry Southern was the class clown of the quality-hip scene, larger, weirder, and a lot funnier than life."
--Jules Feiffer "Terry Southern is a dirty Red and a marijuana head and one of the major American satirists of the twentieth century."
--Tony Hendra "If there were a Mount Rushmore of American humor, Terry Southern would be the mountain they'd carve it from"
--Michael O'Donoghue, former writer/producer for Saturday Night Live "Terry Southern is the American writer most capable of handling frenzy on a gigantic scale."
--Esquire "Terry Southern . . . has emerged in hindsight as a kind of real-life Forrest Gump figure--present at the creation of virtually everything new, liberating and free-spirited in post-World War II arts and culture."
--Denver Post