Terry Southern gained renown in the early sixties as a writer of controversial novels and screenplays. Candy, published in 1958 was one of the few novels in English ever banned in France on grounds of indecency, and The Magic Christian, published in 1960, was a brilliant, dark satire that Lenny Bruce called, "the funniest book I've ever read." Stanley Kubrick tapped Southern to work on Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, a movie that film historian Robert Sklar said, "satirized the cold-war mentality and helped lay the groundwork for the 1960s counterculture." Southern later collaborated with Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda on Easy Rider, a movie that became an instant counterculture classic.