About the Author
Novelist, playwright and actor James Leo Herlihy was born in 1927 to a working class family in Detroit, Michigan. After serving in World War II, Herlihy studied art, literature and music at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, an institution whose faculty boasted such luminaries from the world of art and music as William De Kooning and John Cage. After a myopic creative writing teacher told Herlihy that he had no future writing novels, the young artist turned his attention to theater. His sensitive ear for verbal mannerisms made this a good fit, and Herlihy found acting roles in over fifty plays over the next few years. The first two plays he authored, Streetlight Sonata (1950) and Moon in Capricorn (1953), were produced at the Pasadena Playhouse, and the collaboratively-written Blue Denim had a successful run on Broadway in 1958.

Professorial admonitions notwithstanding, Herlihy continued to write fiction as well. In 1960 he published All Fall Down, a critically acclaimed work that was later adapted into a film. In 1965 he published Midnight Cowboy, which, along with All Fall Down, would form the basis for his reputation as a fiction writer. Midnight Cowboy was adapted into the landmark film of the same name, in part defining-for better or for worse- Herlihy's place in the public eye. And although Herlihy thought highly of the film, his experience with Hollywood was not a pleasant one.

After Midnight Cowboy, Herlihy retreated from the public eye somewhat, turning his attention to teaching. He took up creative writing posts at the City College of New York, the University of Arkansas and the University of Southern California. He wrote only one other novel, Season of the Witch (1971), which, along with a collection of short stories and plays, A Story That Ends in a Scream and Eight Others (1967), would be his only publications after Midnight Cowboy. James Leo Herlihy died in Los Angeles in 1993 of an overdose of sleeping medication.