James Leo Herlihy
Rosetta Books and PLGB annunce an e-book and POD four book deal!
Two novels by James Leo Herlihy
All Fall Down and The Season of the Witch
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plus his two short story collections
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A Story That Ends With A Scream and The Sleep of Baby Filbertson
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With a new release of Midnight Cowboy
Midnight Cowboy: one of the greatest American novels published since World War II.
Joe Buck, a naive but eager and ambitious young Texan leaves a Texas dead-end job in search of a grand and glamorous life in New York City. The city turns out to be a much more difficult place to negotiate than he imagined, and he soon finds himself - and his dreams - compromised. Buck's fall from innocence and his relationship with the crippled street hustler Ratso Rizzo are the novel's co-nucleus. Ratso and Joe Buck's unlikely pairing is one of the most complex portraits of friendship in contemporary literature.
The focus on male friendship follows the path cut by Twain's Huck and Jim, Melville's Ishmael and Queequeg, Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby, and Kerouac's Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarity. Midnight Cowboy takes a well-deserved place among the distinguished American novels that examine, often with unnerving and disturbing candor, those who live on the fringes of society.
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Best selling author of Midnight Cowboy James Leo Herlihy was born in 1927 in Detroit, Michigan to a working class family. After serving in World War II, Herlihy studied art, literature, and music at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, whose faculty had boasted such luminaries as William De Kooning and John Cage. After a professor told Herlihy he had no future as a writer, the disillusioned Herlihy turned his attention to theater, where he met with considerable success and found acting roles in more than fifty plays over the span of several years.But Herlihy continued writing fiction despite the discouragement he'd received, and in 1960 he published All Fall Down, a critically acclaimed work, later adapted for film. In 1965 he published Midnight Cowboy, which cemented his reputation as a serious writer. After the success of Midnight Cowboy, Herlihy retreated from the public eye and turned his attention to teaching. He taught creative writing at City College of New York, the University of Arkansas, and the University of Southern California. Herlihy died in Los Angeles in 1993.
