James Leo Herlihy

Detroit-born James Leo Herlihy went into the Navy straight from high school in 1945, but the war ended before he got to see any combat. After his discharge, he attended North Carolina's Black Mountain College--a small, experimental institution with an emphasis on art, music and literature and with such figures as Willem de Kooning and John Cage on its faculty--on the GI Bill, and it was there he became friends with such authors as Anaïs Nin. Upon leaving the college he moved to Pasadana, CA, in 1948, where he attended the famed Pasadena Playhouse College for the next two years. He performed in about 50 plays all up and down the West Coast for the next several years, and eventually moved to Boston, MA, becoming a member of the Theater Company of Boston. He wrote for various television shows throughout the mid-'50s, and in 1958 his play "Blue Denim" enjoyed a successful run on Broadway and was made in a film the next year (Blue Denim (1959)). His novel "All Fall Down" was made into a movie in 1962 (All Fall Down (1962)), but it wasn't until 1968 that his best known novel--published in 1965--became one of the biggest film hits in history--Midnight Cowboy (1969), the story of a young and naive Texan who comes to New York dreaming of becoming a gigolo to rich society women but becomes entangled with one of Times Square's scuzziest denizens. The controversial film--excoriated by many conservative social and religious groups for its depiction of the title character as a male prostitute--was the first X-rated movie to win an Academy Award. Although "Midnight Cowboy" sealed his fame as an author, he only turned out two more books in his career, a short story collection called "A Story That Ends in a Scream" in 1967 and a novel about teenage runaways, "The Season of the Witch", in 1971. He concentrated on teaching, giving classes in playwriting at New York's City College, and was appointed a visiting professor at the University of Arkansas' Fayetteville campus in 1983. He also taught classes in acting and writing at Colorado College and the University of Southern California. He committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills at his home in Los Angeles on October 21, 1993.