Famous People I Have Known bookcover

Famous People I Have Known

4.9/5.0
21,000+ Reviews
Bookshop.org has the highest-rated customer service of any bookstore in the world

Description

Ed McClanahan's hilarious classic introduces us to writers and revolutionaries, hippies and honkies, gurus and go-go girls, barkeeps and barflies, as well as Carlos Toadvine, aka Little Enis, the All-American Left-Handed Upside-down Guitar Player, among the characters he has encountered in thirty peripatetic years of wandering the fringes of the academic and literary worlds from his native Kentucky to the West Coast (where his compatriots included Ken Kesey and Tom Wolfe) and back again.

Product Details

PublisherUniversity Press of Kentucky
Publish DateNovember 01, 2003
Pages186
LanguageEnglish
TypeBook iconPaperback / softback
EAN/UPC9780813190693
Dimensions8.6 X 5.5 X 0.7 inches | 0.6 pounds
BISAC Categories: Biography & Memoir

About the Author

Ed McClanahan is a native of northeastern Kentucky and the author of several books, including The Natural Man and Not Even Immortality Lasts Forever. He is editor of Spit in the Ocean #7: All About Kesey, a memorial collection of writings about the late Ken Kesey. His work has appeared in magazines such as Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Playboy. He has also been awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in creative writing at Stanford University, two Yaddo Fellowships, and an Al Smith Fellowship.

Reviews

"As a product of literary art, Famous People I Have Known is unique and great. As autobiography, it is peerless. As social history, it is an act of sanity redeemed by humor. As comedy, it is ever nourished by good sense. Please bring it back into print and keep it in print, so that it will be always available to the people of Kentucky, whose treasure it rightfully is." -- Wendell Berry


"A curious combination of raw four-letter explicitness and high literary style.... The combination is exhilarating." -- People


"McClanahan's autobiographical accounts are so lively that they sound more like fiction; his outrageous experiences with trendsetters and cultural luminaries of the 1960s are reported with the detail of a retrospectively clear-headed but capricious artist." -- Publishers Weekly


"McClanahan's picaresque account of his immersion into the revolutionary excesses of the 1960s -- the consciousness expanded 'through the miracle of chemistry, ' endless parties, many protests -- reminds readers that at the heart of that frequently maligned decade was a great deal of fun." -- Lexington Herald-Leader


"McClanahan's pungent tales of the fools he's known and the fools he's been will linger long in the reader's mind." -- Newsweek


"Most people who have had as much fun as Ed McClanahan are dead." -- Bob Edwards


"Mr. McClanahan makes us laugh with his recollections of the innocent beginnings of the 1960s...and that laughter is a value all by itself." -- Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times


"Your 'Ken Kesey, Jean Genet, the Revolution, et Moi' is fabulous. I had never heard of Kesey's encounter with Genet before, but in your pages I could see and hear it all. You've captured both of them perfectly. 'Furthurmore: An Afterword' is great stuff, too. In fact, the whole book has a wonderful rollicking momentum." -- Tom Wolfe, from a letter to Ed McClanahan

Earn by promoting books

Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.sign up to affiliate program link
Become an affiliate