Born in 1924, Terry Southern was a novelist and screenwriter famous for his dark, biting satirical style. From the postwar Paris literary movement of the 1950s to the Greenwich Village Beat writers to the swinging London of the 1960s, Southern left an indelible mark on the style of American storytelling in the twentieth century. As one of the screenwriters behind the Academy Award–nominated Dr. Strangelove, as well as The Cincinnati Kid and Easy Rider, he helped to create the independent film movement in the 1970s. In the 1980s he was one of the writers on Saturday Night Live. His literary output includes Flash and Filigree, The Magic Christian, Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes, and Blue Movie, among others. He died in 1995.

Before New Journalism, before the waggish cinema of Woody Allen, before the Gonzo World of Hunter S. Thompson, Saturday Night Live, and National Lampoon, there was the legendary Terry Southern—author of Candy and The Magic Christian and the screenwriter of Dr. Strangelove and Easy Rider.

Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes, widely recognized as an underground classic, is a collection of Southern's short pieces, two dozen hilarious, well-observed, and devastating sketches that expose the hypocrisy of American social mores. This edition features an introduction by George Plimpton, one of Southern's longtime literary allies and former editor of The Paris Review.