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.

Chapter 1

In his new boots, Joe Buck was six-foot-one and life was different. As he walked out of that store in Houston something snapped in the whole bottom half of him: A kind of power he never even knew was there had been released in his pelvis and he was able to feel the world through it. Brand-new muscles came into play in his buttocks and in his legs, and he was aware of a totally new attitude toward the sidewalk. The world was down there, and he was way up here, on top of it, and the space between him and it was now commanded by a beautiful strange animal, himself, Joe Buck. He was strong. He was exultant. He was ready.

"I'm ready," he said to himself, and he wondered what he meant by that.

Joe knew he was no great shakes as a thinker and he knew that what thinking he did was best done looking in a mirror, and so his eyes cast about for something that would show him a reflection of himself. Just ahead was a store window. Ta-click ta-click ta-click ta-click, his boots said to the concrete, meaning power power power power, as he approached the window head on, and there was this new and yet familiar person coming at him, broad-shouldered, swaggering, cool and handsome. Lord, I'm glad I'm you, he said to his image -- but not out loud -- and then, Hey, what's all this ready crap? What you ready for?

And then he remembered.

When he arrived at the H tel, a hotel that not only had no name but had lost its O as well, he felt the absurdity of anyone so rich and hard and juicy as himself ever staying in such a nameless, no-account place. He ran up the stairs two at a time, went to the second floor rear and hurried into the closet, emerging seconds later with a large package. He removed the brown paper and placed on the bed a black-and-white horsehide suitcase.

He folded his arms, stood back and looked at it, shaking his head in awe. The beauty of it never failed to move him. The black was so black and the white so white and the whole thing so lifelike and soft, it was like owning a miracle. He checked his hands for dirt, then brushed at the hide as if it were soiled. But of course it wasn't, he was merely brushing away the possibility of future dirt.

Joe set about removing from their hiding place other treasures purchased in recent months: six brand-new Western-cut shirts, new slacks (black gabardines and black cottons), new underwear, socks (a half dozen pair, still in their cellophanes), two silk handkerchiefs to be worn at his neck, a silver ring from Juarez, an eight-transistor portable radio that brought in Mexico City without a murmur of static, a new electric razor, four packs of Camels and several of Juicy Fruit chewing gum, toilet articles, a stack of old letters, etc.

Then he took a shower and returned to the room to groom himself for the trip.

 

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 Things Fall, a critically acclaimed work that was later adapted into a film. In 1965 he published Midnight Cowboy, which, along with All Things Fall, 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.