“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

“Most people who have had as much fun as Ed McClanahan are dead.”—Bob Edwards

“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

“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

“A curious combination of raw four-letter explicitness and high literary style…. The combination is exhilarating.”—People

“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

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—“working the Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing circuit”—from his native Kentucky to the West Coast and back again.

Stegner fellow and Merry Prankster Ed McClanahan is the author of several books, including A Congress of Wonders, My Vita, If You Will, and the novel The Natural Man. He lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

Paperback: 220 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.75 x 8.75 x 5.75

Publisher: Gnomon Press; (November 1997)

$16.95 plus shipping