Harold L. Humes

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Harold L. Humes, also known as "Doc", was the originator of The Paris Review literary magazine, author of two critically-acclaimed novels in the late fifties, and a gregarious fixture of the cultural scene in Paris, London, and New York in the 1950's and early 1960's. He was a champion talker, activist, filmmaker, architect, and contemporary Don Quixote. In 1966, in London, he took large amounts of LSD, which were given to him by Timothy Leary, and he became psychotic. After this, he no longer did 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, Princeton, Bennington, and Harvard, dependent on students who were fascinated by his mixture of erudition and mental illness and on his family.

For more, especially about a forthcoming documentary film about Doc, see dochumes.com.

Doc was born in Douglas, Arizona in 1926, and died at St. Rose's Home in New York City in 1992. He attended MIT, but left in 1948 to go to Paris.

There he had an English language magazine called The Paris News Post, edited by Leon Kafka. Doc recruited the young American blueblood Peter Matthiessen as literary editor, not knowing till much later that he was working for the CIA at the time. Together they founded The Paris Review, a literary journal -- and soon brought in George Plimpton, who would remain its editor for fifty years.

After studying at Harvard, finishing in 1954, Doc wrote two novels, The Underground City (Random House, 1957) and Men Die (Random House, 1959). He also directed Don Peyote, a movie starring Ojo de Vidrio, and designed several paper product components for building houses out of paper as affordable housing alternatives.

Full name: Harold Louis Humes, Jr., aka Doc Humes. His father was a chemical engineer from Michigan who studied at McGill. His mother, Alexandra Elizabeth McGonnigle, came from Montreal. Both parents were Christian Science practitioners.

Doc grew up in Princeton NJ, graduating from Princeton High. 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 in the 20th Century, a popular comic book.

In later years on recounting his memories of MIT, he spoke especially highly of his professor Norbert Weiner, the author of the book Cybernetics. At Harvard he studied Fiction Writing with Archibald MacLeish. He also participated in Leary and Alpert's LSD experiments while there, and later continued his own experiments, guiding the first LSD experiences of several famous literary friends.

In 1954 he married Anna Lou Elianoff, daughter of the linens designer Luba Elianoff. They had four daughters. (She divorced him in 1966 and married Nelson W. Aldrich Jr in 1967, who had worked at the Paris Review as an editor.)

In 1964 he wrote a paper entitled 'Bernoulli's Epitaph' espousing a theory of the shape of the universe as that of a spherical vortex, noting as an aside that a cross-section of a spherical vortex looks like a yin-yang symbol... He started work on a third novel, titled "The Memoirs of Dorsey Slade," but never finished it.

By 1967, Doc had developed a detoxification method for heroin addiction that involved, in his terms, micro-doses of LSD, medical-grade hashish, emergency-massage techniques, flotation exercises and breath work, which he clained if done correctly would lead to a rebirthing experience over a 3-5 day length of time, and he was practicing these techniques in what he termed 'crash-pad clinics' in Rome, Italy.

By 1968, he was in Paris in time to be jailed in the demonstrations that were part of the student revolution there. He was back in the states by the end of that year. (More to come)