Hubert Selby Jr. biography

Synopsis

Early Life

Writer. Hubert Selby Jr., perhaps best known for his novel Last Exit to Brooklyn, was born on July 23, 1928 in Brooklyn, New York, USA.

Selby went to sea as a merchant marine while still in his teens. Laid low by lung disease, he was, after a decade of hospitalizations, written off as a goner and sent home to die. Deciding instead to live, but having no way to make a living, he came to a realization that would change the course of literature: "I knew the alphabet. Maybe I could be a writer." Drawing from the soul of his Brooklyn neighborhood, he began writing The Queen Is Dead, which evolved six years later, into his first novel, Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964), a book that Allen Ginsberg predicted would "explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years."

Last Exit to Brooklyn

Damned and praised with equal fire, Last Exit to Brooklyn more than fulfilled the first part of Ginsberg's prophecy; and today, over thirty years later, it is well on its way to fulfilling the latter: standing as the first breath and testament of a wholly new poetic, as a classic not only of contemporary literature but of the literature of the ages as well. Even The New York Times would be compelled to recognize "Selby's place in the front rank of American novelists," to see in his work "the power, the intimacy with suffering and morality, the honesty and moral urgency of Dostoevsky's," and to say that, "To understand Selby's work is to understand the anguish of America."

More Novels

Selby's second novel, The Room (1971), considered by some to be his masterpiece, received, as Selby said, "the greatest reviews I've ever read in my life," then rapidly vanished leaving barely a trace of its existence. Over the years, however, especially in Europe, The Room has come to be recognized as what Selby himself perceives it to be: the most disturbing book ever written, a book that he himself was unable to read again for twenty years after writing it.

"A man obsessed / is a man possessed / by a demon." Thus the defining epigraph of The Demon (1976), a novel that, like The Room, has been better understood and more widely embraced abroad than at home.

If The Room is Selby's own favorite among his books, Requiem for a Dream (1978) contains his favorite opening line: "Harry locked his mother in the closet." It is perhaps the truest and most horrific tale of heroin addiction ever written.