Harold L. Humes
| Harold Louis Humes, Jr. | |
|---|---|
| Born |
May 11, 1926 Douglas, Arizona, United States |
| Died |
September 10, 1992 (aged 66) New York City, United States |
| Occupation |
Novelist Journalist Editor-in-chief Teacher |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | MIT, undergrad, not completed; Harvard (Adjunct of Arts, 1954) |
Harold Louis Humes, Jr. (May 11, 1926 – September 10, 1992) was known as HL Humes in his books, and usually as "Doc" Humes in life. He was the originator of The Paris Review literary magazine, author of two novels in the late 1950s, and a gregarious fixture of the cultural scene in Paris, London, and New York in the 1950s and early 1960s. He was a champion talker, activist, filmmaker, architect, and contemporary Don Quixote.
In 1966, in London, he took large amounts of LSD, which was given to him by Timothy Leary, and he became paranoid and sometimes delusional. After this, he no longer published any writing. When he returned to the US in 1969, he reinvented himself as a "guru on campus", a self-appointed visiting professor, and spent the next 20-odd years living on or near-campus at Columbia University, Princeton University, Bennington College, and Harvard University, dependent on both his family, and on students who were fascinated by his mixture of erudition and mental illness.
Humes was born in Douglas, Arizona. His father was a chemical engineer from Michigan who studied at McGill University. His mother, Alexandra Elizabeth McGonnigle, came from Montreal. Both parents were Christian Science practitioners.
Humes grew up in Princeton, New Jersey and graduated from Princeton High School. It was there that he won his lifelong nickname, when his classmates dubbed him Doc after "Doc Huer", a brilliant scientist/nutty professor in Buck Rogers, a popular comic strip.
He attended MIT, and did a stint in the United States Navy, but left in 1948 to go to Paris.
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