HUSTLER®50 is a visually stunning coffee table book that takes readers through the magazine’s rich history, showcasing its most talked-about moments, groundbreaking photography and unwavering commitment to free speech. Enjoy this special excerpt. Then order the elegant hard-cover collector’s edition—200-plus gorgeous pages!—available now at HUSTLERHollywood.com or through your favorite bookseller.
Larry Flynt, the founder and publisher of HUSTLER®, called it “the best magazine you could read with one hand.” He made no bones about his brainchild: it is in-your-face, unapologetic pornography featuring page after page of juicy pink close-ups normally seen only by a loving partner or a gynecologist.
So how does a dirty magazine come to inspire a glossy book meant to be placed in plain view on your coffee table instead of hidden away in your garage where the wife can’t find it? How does a magazine like this last 50 years while its competitors peter out one by one?
The answer is that HUSTLER is and always has been so much more than a skin mag. It’s a humor magazine. It’s a political magazine. Most importantly, it’s the magazine that rose to the challenge when government censors targeted it for daring to put out material they deemed obscene. Publishers, pundits, and parodists today enjoy the right to be offensive because one man, Larry Flynt, went to court countless times to fight for that right, landing himself in jail and even getting gunned down for printing what he pleased. But he didn’t start out as a champion of the First Amendment.
“Anyone can be a playboy and have a penthouse, but it takes a man to be a HUSTLER.”
— Larry Flynt
Larry Claxton Flynt was born at home on November 1, 1942, in a tiny Kentucky hollow called Lakeville (original name: Lickskillet), a place Larry later likened to a “medieval settlement.” Many of his neighbors were illiterate and had never traveled more than a few miles from the “holler.”
Larry was ambitious from the start, spending one summer going door-to-door selling berries he had picked in the wild. Years later, when one of his old teachers was interviewed for a local paper, she recalled asking him, “What are you going to be when you grow up?” “A millionaire,” he replied.
