What I've read - "Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution."

Bill Hicks' comedy inspires me. His viewpoints and ideas are as relevant today as they were 16 years ago, when he died. What I learned from Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution by Kevin Booth and Michael Bertin was that he was as complex and fucked up as anyone. Brilliant and an addict. Compassionate soul and kind of an asshole. A loving man who wasn't so loving at times to a lot of people. But the man had the spark of genius, he did. Great book.

"Written by Bill Hick's lifelong friend, producer, and co-creator, Kevin Booth offers the inside story into the man who was only along for the ride for a tragically short time, yet left an indelible mark on comedy enthusiasts and freethinkers everywhere. "Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution" offers a rare fly-on-the-wall insight into the life of one of Britain's most loved US comedians. Adored in the UK for his unique style of savage, hilarious comedy, the one person who knew him inside and out tells of a man whose life was just as impassioned and off-the-wall as his comedy. Even back at high school, in Houston, Texas, Kevin was Bill's co-conspirator, as they sneaked out of Bill's strict Baptist home at night, and headed for the Comedy Workshop, where at the age of fourteen, Bill was going down a storm. They virtually shared every experience - from magic mushrooms to girls, but it was their music and their vision of comedy, which bound them so closely together. Kevin produced, engineered and performed on many of Bill's recordings, and it is largely due to him, that so much of Bill's comedy is readily available on CD and video. Michael Bertin, a hugely talented author from Austin, Texas, is co-writing Kevin's fly-on-the-wall biography of Bill Hicks."

Hicks was pretty gutted by being cut from Letterman about five months before he died of pancreatic cancer, and I thought that this bit below serves as a great coda to his memory.

Bill Hicks - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

"...On October 1, 1993, about five months before his death, Hicks was scheduled to appear on The Late Show with David Letterman, his twelfth appearance on a Letterman late night show (his prior 11 appearances having been on Late Night with David Letterman), but his entire performance was removed from the broadcast - the only occasion, up to that point, in which a comedian's entire routine had been cut after taping. Hicks' stand-up routine was removed from the show allegedly because Letterman and his producer were nervous about Hicks' religious jokes. Both the show's producers and CBS denied responsibility. Hicks expressed his feelings of betrayal in a hand-written, 39-page letter to John Lahr of The New Yorker. Although Letterman later expressed regret at the way Hicks had been handled, he did not appear on the show again...

Mary Hicks appeared on the January 30, 2009, episode of The Late Show. Letterman played Hicks' routine in its entirety. Letterman took full responsibility for the original censorship and apologized to Bill's mother, Mary Hicks, who had accepted his invitation to be a guest on the show. Letterman also declared he didn't know what he had been thinking when he pulled the routine from the original show in 1993. Letterman said, "It says more about me as a guy than it says about Bill because there was absolutely nothing wrong with it."