In Italy in the summer of 1952 Truman Capote was asked by the director John Huston (on the recommendation of David Selznick, who had admired Capote’s work on an ill-fated Vittorio De Sica movie entitled Indiscretion of an American Wife) to collaborate with him on the script for a movie called Beat the Devil. 

One of my oddest trips in a lifetime of odd trips was one that I took with Terry Southern across the U.S.A. in 1964. At that time I’d known Terry (whom I also called, depending on mood and circumstance, “Tex” or “T”) ever since 1952 during a long sojourn in Paris. Like a patient in lengthy convalescence, the city was still war weary, with its beauty a little drab around the edges. 

Part I: Texas.    Born in the small cotton-farming town of Alvarado, 1924. My dad, a pharmacist and descendant of the notorious “Indian lover” and first prez of the Republic of Texas, Sam Houston. Around high-school age moved to Fort Worth and Dallas. Attended Sunset High School, learned how to get girls drunk on the original Grayhound — grapefruit juice masking the taste of vod — followed by the adroit and surreptitious use of sharpened rounded-point kindergarten scissors to snip away that last bastion of defense, the panty crotch panel. 

As we stroked Terry’s forehead and held his hand, he would casually remove the mask as if about to shave or sleep. Before his oxygenation level fell below 69, I would gently hold the mask before his nose, careful not to let it chafe and crimp him.

“You’ve got to keep the mask on,” my mother Carol said, “it’s what’s keeping you alive.”

His gentle, soft-spoken manner was reassuring. When I got my script back from him highlighted with yellow Post-it notes, I realized his keen perception hadn’t missed a thing. A fellow Texan, his masterful grasp and intimate knowledge of Texas slang helped reshape my wacky Texas characters into movie material.

When word came on the last day of October, 1995 that Terry Southern had died, Henry Allen, a staff writer for The Washington Post, asked if he could write an appreciation for the next morning’s edition. He bicycled home in a rainstorm, six miles, to refer to his collection of Southern work, and in two and a half hours wrote his copy for the following day. It is essentially what appears here, with a few additions.

The portraits that follow are from a large number of photographs recently recovered from sealed archives in Moscow, some—rumor has it—from a cache in the bottom of an elevator shaft. Five of those that follow, Akhmatova, Chekhov (with dog), Nabokov, Pasternak (with book), and Tolstoy (on horseback) are from a volume entitled The Russian Century, published early last year by Random House. Seven photographs from that research, which were not incorporated in The Russian Century, are published here for the first time: Bulgakov, Bunin , Eisenstein (in a group with Pasternak and Mayakovski), Gorki, Mayakovski, Nabokov (with mother and sister), Tolstoy (with Chekhov), and Yesenin. The photographs of Andreyev, Babel, and Kharms were supplied by the writers who did the texts on them. The photograph of Dostoyevsky is from the Bettmann archives. Writers who were thought to have an especial affinity with particular Russian authors were asked to provide the accompanying texts. We are immensely in their debt for their cooperation.