A Grand Guy: The Art and Life of Terry Southern
A Grand Guy: The Art and Life of Terry Southern by Lee Hill, published by Harper Collins Publishers
Chapter One: "Youngblood"
Magical. Stifling.
These were the two extremes of Terry Southern's attitude toward Texas. In his final novel, Texas Summer,Southern described the Lone Star State as a place where contradiction reigned. "The pond was like an oasis in a desert, a Shangri-la, with an atmosphere, almost a climate, separate from its immediate surroundings. A shimmering oval of crystalline blue, fringed with weeping willows interwoven in a soft-focus double ring because of their reflection in the water, the pond resembled an exotic blue mirror, its frame intricately filigreed. But there was something else—something curiously, classically, of Texas about the scene—a quality of strange hidden contrasts, something of abrupt mystery . . . a secret celebration of nature at its most darkly persuasive: the diamondback rattler coiled in a field of bluebonnets, the scorpion beneath the yellow rose."
Southern struggled for thirty years to complete Texas Summer. He strived to resolve his extreme ambivalence toward his birthplace. The novel, originally called Youngblood (a friendly nod to the hit by his songwriting pals Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller), reworked short stories that appeared in the 1967 anthology,Red Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes. . . . 
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