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As they sat down - at a booth next to the blaring juke box - Joe watched Rizzo take his left leg in both hands and lift it into place under the table. His teeth were clenched and his face went pale with the effort.

For Joe this was a precarious moment: the awareness that his new friend was in pain, probably lived in a constant state of pain, threatened to wreck entirely this brilliant hour they'd been having. Liquor had given Joe special seeing powers, and he saw now a truth about life heretofore hidden from him: that always, in even the finest hour, there lurked this potential sudden ugliness. You could be going along just great with somebody and a new piece of information would turn everything blue and sad. This, and the knowledge that there was nothing he could do to right the bad leg, induced in Joe an anger that was fierce. So fierce he was unable to maintain for long his focus upon the object of it. And there he was with all this fury and no one to throw it at...

In some ways, it was unfortunate for author James Leo Herlihy that his novel Midnight Cowboy was adapted into the landmark film of the same name starring Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight. Although the film, which won several Oscars including Best Picture, certainly brought the rising author a new level of regard and notice, its almost legendary status in the history of American filmmaking has somewhat overshadowed its literary progenitor. This is especially unfortunate since Herlihy's work is considered by many to be one of the best American novels published since World War II.

The novel's protagonist is Joe Buck, a naïve young Texan who decides to leave his dead-end job and find a grander, more glamorous life in New York City. The city, of course, turns out to be a much harder place to conquer than Joe expected, and he soon finds his dream compromised. Buck's fall from innocence and his relationship with the crippled street hustler Ratso Rizzo form the novel's emotional nucleus, and the unlikely pair is one of the most sensitively-drawn and complex portraits of friendship in recent literature.

The focus on male friendship is in fact a longstanding motif in American literature: 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 are some of the notable examples. Herlihy's Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo continue this venerable tradition in their unique, starkly-drawn fashion. Midnight Cowboy also takes a well-deserved place among a group of distinguished American novels that write-often with unnerving candor-about people living on the "margins" of society: Nathaniel West's Miss Lonleyhearts, John Fante's Ask the Dust, Kerouac's On the Road, and William Burroughs' Junky, to name a few. Midnight Cowboy, written by Herlihy with a unique mixture of severe realism and sensitivity, may well prove to be the best and most durable of these accomplished works of fiction.