Dust jacket design by John Haines.

STOP, YOU'RE KILLING ME.

Herlihy, James Leo

Simon & Schuster (1970)

Midnight Cowboy is the powerful and unforgettable novel of the compelling need of human beings for one another -- a wrenching story of pain and loss. 
 Freewheeling loser Joe Buck arrives in New York City and embarks on a quest to live the American dream. Along the way he meets street hustler and petty criminal Ratso Rizzo. Together, the two form an extraordinary relationship full of heartbreak and hope, resulting in a compelling American novel about the bonds of friendship. 
 This classic novel, originally published in 1965, was the source of the OscarÂ®-winning film starring Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight.

Midnight Cowboy

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

I Books

Midnight Cowboy is considered by many to be one of the best American novels published since World War II. The main story centers around Joe Buck, a naive but eager and ambitious young Texan, who decides to leave his dead-end job in search of a grand and glamorous life he believes he will find in New York City. But the city turns out to be a much more difficult place to negotiate than Joe could ever have imagined. He soon finds himself and his dreams compromised. Buck's fall from innocence, and his relationship with the crippled street hustler, Ratso Rizzo, form the novel's emotional nucleus. This unlikely pairing of Ratso and Joe Buck is perhaps one of the most complex portraits of friendship in contemporary literature. The focus on male friendship follows a strong 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 a group of distinguished American novels that write—often with unnerving candor—about those who live on the fringe of society.

Midnight Cowboy: A Novel

United States

Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

A teenage boy’s image of his older brother is shattered by tragedy in this “remarkable first novel” by the author of Midnight Cowboy (New York Herald Tribune Book Review).\nSome families get a reputation for being strange, and so it is with the Williamses of Seminary Street. The father, once an outspoken socialist, now keeps to his rocks glass. The mother has a reputation for scaring children. But the older son, named Berry-berry, is the most whispered-about of them all. A traveling vagabond, he’s known for his cleft chin, loose morals, and streaks of violence.\nThen there’s sixteen-year-old Clinton, who spends his time filling notebooks with every conversation he can overhear, word for word. When Clinton escapes the confines of home to find his big brother, he hopes to make a connection more real than anything he’s put down on paper. But finding Berry-berry in coastal Florida will set off a tragic series of events that will stay with Clinton, and his family, forever.\n“There is something very wonderful about this book; it has a luminous thing that is the best thing in writing or any kind of art.” —Tennessee Williams\n“Herlihy writes with an edge of iron.” —Nelson Algren, National Book Award–winning author of The Man with the Golden Arm

All Fall Down: A Novel

RosettaBooks

The author of Midnight Cowboy delivers a short story collection about the yearnings of those who live on the margins: "Herlihy writes with an edge of iron" (Nelson Algren). In his second collection of short stories, James Leo Herlihy explores a landscape at the fringes of society. Drawn with his signature humor and deft dialogue, Herlihy's characters search for the fragments of meaning that have gone missing from their lives. In the titular story, Mary Ellen McClure's unfulfilled, trailer park life is driven to the breaking point when she suspects her husband of having an affair. But when a Ouija board gives her the message that she will have an affair of her own, Mary Ellen becomes enamored with the fantasy--and resolves to go looking for her mysterious lover. Other stories tell of Consilada Rector, who can't get people to believe in the leprechaun that presides over her husband's bar; Mrs. Dorothy Fitzpatrick, who records the existence of a ghostly mail delivery truck; and a dying man who comes to stay with a mother and her blessed son William.

A Story that Ends With a Scream: And Eight Others

Literary

By the author of Midnight Cowboy: A teenage girl runs away to the East Village in “one of the best and most convincing novels . . . of the Woodstock generation” (Publishers Weekly).\nAs she explains in her diary, seventeen-year-old Gloria Random is running away from her Midwest childhood home. It’s the fall of 1969, and her best friend John has been called up for the draft. It’s time to escape the Big Finger, and their mundane lives.\nRenaming themselves Witch and Roy, they head to New York City in search of Witch’s biological father. Landing in the East Village, they fall into an underground world of mysticism, drugs, and free love as they burrow further into hiding from the realities they left behind.\nIn his last novel, the iconic author of Midnight Cowboy and All Fall Down captures the heady mix of anxiety and experimentation that permeated New York at the height of the anti-war movement. With his trademark wit and insight, James Leo Herlihy brings together a colorful cast of characters straight from the heart of the countercultural revolution.\n“A tour de force!” —The New York Times\n“Herlihy writes with an edge of iron.” —Nelson Algren, National Book Award–winning author of The Man with the Golden Arm

Season of the Witch: A Novel

Stop, You're Killing Me.

James Leo Herlihy

Dramas & Plays

Dramatists Play Service, Inc.

The Sleep of Reason: Lyle Bonge's Ultimate Ash-Hauling Mardi Gras Photographs (Jargon (Jargon Society), 77.)

Politics & Social Sciences

Bonge, Lyle

Social Sciences

Jargon Society

Herlihy, James Leo, Noble, William

Blue Denim: A Play in Three Acts

Noble, William

Literary Licensing, LLC

All Fall Down

Pocket Books, Inc.

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