How we work: Gustav Hasford, author

Hasford (1947-1993), whose book The Short-Timers (1979)  was the source material for Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, was a serial hoarder of very overdue library books.

His cousin writes:

I first met Gus Hasford in 1981 when a mutual friend brought him to dinner at my place in Santa Monica [...] Once the ice was broken, we quickly discovered that we had common interests in such arcane subjects as "lost" Depression-era novels and the history of the American West. That first evening, Hasford referred to his enormous and somewhat mysterious collection of books (which he keeps in storage), and then chatted freely about his admittedly grandiose literary plans.  He said he was going to write several series of books on various topics, in various genres

1988:

He was wanted last week by campus police at the California Polytechnic State University, who had discovered nearly 10,000 library books, including seven overdue from Cal Poly, in storage lockers Hasford rented in San Luis Obispo. The books came from libraries as far afield as Australia. Hasford had been listed as AWB (absent with books) after checking out 87 volumes and 500 periodicals from the Cal Poly library in two weeks last December. Campus police plan to ask the local district attorney to charge the author with grand theft. Hasford's attorney, Louis Blau, contends that "most of those books were purchased at library sales."

1989:

The late author Gustav Hasford, who wrote the book on which the film Full Metal Jacket was based, received a six-month jail sentence in 1989 after a few hundred of the 650 cubic feet of books he kept in a Californian self-storage unit turned out to be overdue from nine libraries.

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Comments

[EVAN LUKE THOMAS]

I was Gus Hasford's journalism partner at DINFOS Indianapolis, IN Jan - May 67.
He was just out of Paris Island bootcamp and told me the story about his DI "getting shot in the shitter". It's exactly what appeared in Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket".
Gus was an existentialist even then and I am sure that what is real about the movie is all Gus. I was an Army journalist wounded with the Marines near the DMZ. Gus was at Phu Bai and we never met in Nam. Kubrick stole bigtime from Gus. And El Lay murdered him for insisting on screen credit and payback.