The Candy Men
The Rollicking Life and Times of the Notorious Novel Candy
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In the early fall of 1958, the notorious Olympia Press in Paris published a novel entitled Candy, an erotic, Rabelaisian satire loosely based on Voltaire's Candide by one Maxwell Kenton, pseudonym of its coauthors, Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg. The novel drew the attention of the French censors, was banned, reissued by Olympia's intrepid publisher under the title Lollipop, rebanned, then again reissued. Within years it became one of the most talked-about novels of the tumultuous 1960s, selling in the millions of copies in America alone, its success prompting Hollywood to turn it into a movie.
The hilarious, rollicking, sometimes tragic story of Candy's public career is recounted here in full. From the book's humble beginnings in late 1950s Paris through its agonizing three-year gestation (sometimes on paper napkins) and the authors' wily, often self-destructive business dealings with their equally wily French publisher, to its chaotic and controversial publication in the United States, The Candy Men follows Candy's underground then mainstream success—with unblinking scrutiny on the details, including the legal shenanigans that surrounded it, the blatant piracy that plagued it, and the star-studded cast that helped make it into one of the worst movies of all time.
Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the spirit of VH1's Behind the Music comes this revealing behind-the-scenes look at the making, breaking, remaking, pirating, filming and legal wrangling of the '60s cult phenomenon Candy. An erotic satire vaguely inspired by Voltaire's Candide and penned under the name Maxwell Kenton (the nom de plume of its ex-pat coauthors, Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg), Candy was first published in 1958 by the notorious French publisher Maurice Giordias. The book was immediately banned, then reissued under the title Lollipop, banned again, then reissued again, sanitized in England and eventually shipped stateside, where thanks to Putnam and a slew of publishing pirates, it leapt to bestsellerdom and was eventually crowned"the world's most talked about book." Southern's own son, Nile, has recounted the novel's bumpy and adventurous journey in a magnificent epistolary style, reprinting the correspondence between Candy's authors, its publisher and its increasingly complicated web of involved parties. The compilation perfectly captures the"growing misunderstandings, temper tantrums, paranoid fixations, jealousies, dreams and utter despair that each of these men went through as they tried to regain control over their book lost in a miasma of cloudy copyright." (Miasma is an apt term: by the second half of the book the legal fog is so thick that it's nearly impossible to keep track of who's suing whom.) Raucous and voyeuristic, this biography of a book offers valuable insight into the Beat scenes of Paris and New York, as well as into the publishing world during an era of shifting attitudes toward censorship. Perhaps most importantly, it also offers a window onto the lives and minds of two wildly creative literary characters: the authors Southern and Hoffenberg themselves.
