Terry Southern (May 1, 1924 – October 29, 1995) was an American writer. He was part of the Paris postwar literary movement in the 1950s. He was a friend to Beat writers in Greenwich Village in the 1960s. In the 1970s he made changes to the way movies were written. In the 1980s he wrote for "Saturday Night Live" and talked about screenwriting at several universities in New York.