Feelgood: a trip in time and out

by Peter de Lissovoy

Autobiographical account of a sweet-natured, dope-dealing, white middle-class, lost young man who drops out of Harvard and learns about life, trouble and sex from the blacks of southwest Georgia in the midst of extreme civil rights tensions.

308 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1970

Reviews

[Geoffrey Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Semi-autobiographical account of a sweet-natured, dope-dealing, white middle-class youth from a northern suburb who drops out of Harvard in 1962 and heads south to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the premier civil rights activist organization, in violently racist rural Georgia. In the next year and a half he also drops out of the movement but learns much about life, trouble and sex from the blacks of southwest Georgia, and about the capacity for brutality and violence, not excluding murder, by whites who see their hegemony threatened — until he comes to fear death himself as a "nigger lover" and knows it's time to leave. The book is notable for the honesty and frankness about the narrator's often confused feelings, the often delicious descriptions of places and people, and especially the sensitive and detailed portrayals of a wide range of personalities black and white, especially the blacks— a deacon and his wife, a rebel ill-disposed to nonviolence, a too-clever thief and conman, winos and various hustlers, a couple of women happy to love him but not so dumb as to trust him, and finally the gentle, wise old marijuana-expert and healer he knows as Dr. Feelgood. De Lissovoy's hero may not have been of much service to the civil rights movement— too easily distracted, too ready to follow another's lead — but he was a superb witness and narrator.