As cultural revolutionary, media celebrity, Yippie, lost soul, and tragic suicide, Abbie Hoffman embodied the contradictions of his era. In this riveting new biography, Jonah Raskin draws on his own twenty-year relationship with Hoffman; hundreds of interviews with friends, family members, and former comrades; and careful scrutiny of FBI files, court records, and public documents. For the Hell of It is a must-read not only for those interested in this ultimate iconoclast, but also for all who seek a fuller understanding of Abbie Hoffman's America.
Jonah Raskin is Professor and Chair of Communication Studies at Sonoma State University and author of My Search for B. Traven (1980), among other books.
"Raskin's biography of Abbie Hoffman pleases precisely because it does not evade the ambiguities of that wild time. For a cynical age, Raskin evokes some of its innocent pleasures: great rock-and-roll, movements against injustices, exuberant sex."—Jonathan Rieder, New York Times Book Review
"As much a corrective to a New Left history of the time as a biography of Abbie Hoffman, the wildest of the wildmen...Raskin's book is arranged like a series of filmed calender pages; behind the pages stand descriptions as vivid as movies of the formative influences moving with lightning speed across those few amazing years while Abbie, and the rhetoric inside him, grew apace."—Vivian Gornick, The Nation
"Hoffman remains one of the most vivid figures in an era that specialized in them...It would be very hard to read his life's story and not be affected by it."—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post
"The book takes [Hoffman], his w ritings, and his politics seriously...Well-researched, well-reported, well-illustrated, and scrupulously documented."—Bruce McCabe, Boston Globe
"Not only a biography of an individual...but a fully rounded portrait of that era...Hoffman remains an utterly fascinating American icon, one of the most important performance-art patriots of our time."—Bernard Weiner, San Francisco Chronicle
315 pp.6 x 9
9780520213791$28.95|£25.00Paper
May 1998