Famous Long Ago by Ray Mungo

I ordered a copy of this one a few weeks ago, and it just came in today.

I said in the Beyond the Revolution thread that I would post a thread on this one as soon as I could look it over, so staying true to my word, here it is:

The full title is Famous Long Ago: My life and hard times with Liberation News Service and was published by Beacon Press, Boston in 1970.
The book is primarily set in the years from 1967-1969, and is pretty much an autobiograhical account of Mungo's experience with LNS, and several adventures of the author and his friends as part of the youth revolution in the late 60's.

The book is a very good account of the underground press, however it is written in a kind of 1960's beatnik slang dialect that 21st century people may find hard to understand.

Mungo's 1990 work, Beyond the Revolution: My life and times since Famous Long Ago, is the sequel to this volume. you can see my thread on it here: http://www.hipforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=200962

If anyone has read either of these, I would appreciate your comments. Thanks.

 

If you're interested in the underground press, I also posted a thread on The Paper Revolutionaries by Larry Leamer:

http://www.hipforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=165371

 

I don't think Famous Long Ago is still in print, but it seems to be a fairly common item on the used market.

I ordered my copy from the amazon.com marketplace, which had no shortage of copies when I placed my order. You can check the availability on Amazon here:
Famous Long Ago (Amazon search)

You can also check for availability of any of Ray's books on the book page of his website:
http://www.raymondmungo.com/books.htm

Click on any of the titles listed on the page, and it will direct you to a Barnes and Noble book search for that title.

 

Unfortunately, I couldn't find any information on that one.

 

Raymond Mungo's book is great for getting at what it was like to be a political radical turned back-to-the-land communard in the late '60s. Mungo writes like a journalist (not a novelist), but pulls no punches. Even looking back 40 years, this book from 1970 shows that Mungo had a pretty good take on what was happening around him, including the establishment crackdowns on their Liberation News Service and the Civil Rights Movement. Mungo's News Service was launched in late 1967 as a result of the "March on the Pentagon" anti-Vietnam War demonstration, the same March that Norman Mailer writes about so eloquently in THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT.

Famous Long Ago is worth reading.