Together they founded The Paris Review, a literary journal, and soon brought in George Plimpton, who would remain its editor for fifty years.
Humes was mentioned in Esquire magazine (along with John Updike and William Styron) as among the nation's most promising young novelists.
By 1967, Humes had developed a detoxification method for heroin addiction that involved, in his terms, micro-doses of LSD, medical-grade hashish, emergency-massage techniques, flotation exercises and breath work, which he claimed - if done correctly - would lead to a 'rebirthing' experience over a 3-5 day length of time.
He was back in the United States by April 1969, which is when he gave away many thousands of dollars in cash on and around the Columbia University campus.
The novelist Paul Auster described him as "a ravaged, burnt-out writer who had run aground on the shoals of his own consciousness.
He would "wheel around and start addressing total strangers, breaking off in midsentence to slap another fifty-dollar bill in someone's hand and urge him to spend it like there was no tomorrow.
computer system (a supposed underground maze of interconnected computers, run by the Government); disappearing and reappearing "lenticular" clouds (claimed by Humes to be heat sinks for alien UFOs); and systems for decoding the supposed hidden messages embedded in the "snow" that would fill a television screen after a broadcast television station had signed off for the night.
; that he had invented and promoted paper houses; that he was a published author; that he had founded The Paris Review; that he was an associate of (and had taken LSD with) Timothy Leary; that the government was spying on him; and so on.
Then, a roommate, Michael, started researching 'Doc" and, much to our utter amazement, we found out that most, if not all, of these "fantasies" were completely true.
He had one son in Italy in 1968, and another in 1977 with the cellist Glynis Lomonn: artist Devin Lomon-Humes,[8] born in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In later years on recounting his memories of MIT, he spoke especially highly of his professor Norbert Wiener, the author of the book Cybernetics.