Hubert "Cubby" Selby Jr. (July 23, 1928 – April 26, 2004) was an American novelist. Two of his books, Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) and Requiem for a Dream (1978), were adapted into films, both of which he appeared in.
With no formal writing training, Selby used a raw language to depict the bleak and violent world that encompassed his youth, which would go on to set the stage for his early life. His first novel was prosecuted for obscenity in the United Kingdom and banned in Italy, which prompted defenses from many leading authors such as Anthony Burgess. He has influenced multiple generations of writers. For more than 20 years, he taught creative writing at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he lived full-time after 1983.
Hubert Selby was born in 1928 in Brooklyn, New York City, to Adalin and Hubert Selby Sr., a merchant seaman and former coal miner from Kentucky. Selby and his wife Adalin had settled in Bay Ridge. Hubert attended public schools, including the competitive Stuyvesant High School.
Selby Jr. dropped out of school at the age of 15 to work in the city docks before becoming a merchant seaman in 1947.
Having been diagnosed with tuberculosis, he was taken off the ship in Bremen, Germany, and sent back to the United States. For the next three and a half years, Selby was in and out of the U.S. Public Health Hospital (part of a system of hospitals originally established to care for merchant seamen) in New York for treatment.
Selby went through an experimental drug treatment, streptomycin, that later caused some severe complications. During an operation, surgeons removed several of Selby's ribs to reach his lungs. One of his lungs collapsed, and doctors removed part of the other.
For the next ten years, Selby was mostly bedridden; he was frequently hospitalized with a variety of lung-related ailments. The doctors offered a bleak prognosis, suggesting he was unlikely to survive long because he "just didn't have enough lung capacity". Gilbert Sorrentino, a childhood friend who had become a writer, encouraged Selby to write fiction. Unable to have regular work because of his health, Selby decided, "I know the alphabet. Maybe I could be a writer."
I was sitting at home and had a profound experience. I experienced, in all of my Being, that someday I was going to die, and it wouldn't be like it had been happening, almost dying but somehow staying alive, but I would just die! And two things would happen right before I died: I would regret my entire life; I would want to live it over again. This terrified me. The thought that I would live my entire life, look at it and realize I blew it forced me to do something with my life.
Little concerned with proper grammar, punctuation, or diction, Selby used unorthodox techniques in most of his works. He indented his paragraphs with alternating lengths, often by simply dropping down one line when finished with a paragraph. Like Jack Kerouac in his "spontaneous prose", Selby often completed his writing in a fast, stream-of-consciousness style. He substituted slashes for apostrophes so he would not have to hold down the CAPS key on a typewriter.
Selby started working on his first short story, "The Queen Is Dead," in 1958. At the time, he had a succession of day jobs, but he wrote every night. During the day, he worked as a clerk, insurance adjuster, and freelance copywriter. The short story developed slowly for the next six years before he published it.
In 1961, his short story "Tralala" was published in the literary journal The Provincetown Review. It also appeared in Black Mountain Review and New Directions. It portrays the seedy life (ridden with violence, theft and mediocre con-artistry) and the gang rape of a prostitute. The journal editor was arrested for selling pornographic literature to a minor. The journal was used as evidence in an obscenity trial, but the case was later dismissed on appeal.
On 24 October 1964, Selby married Judith Lumino, but the marriage soon fell apart. As he continued to write, his longtime friend LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), the poet and playwright, encouraged him to contact Sterling Lord, then Kerouac's agent. Selby combined "Tralala", "The Queen Is Dead" and four other loosely linked short stories as part of his first novel, Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964). The novel was accepted and published by Grove Press, which had already published works by William S. Burroughs. In November 1964, The New York Times literary critic Eliot Fremont-Smith described the novel as "a brutal book," concluding that it "is not a book one 'recommends'--except perhaps to writers. From them, those who wish to read it, it deserves attention."
Last Exit to Brooklyn was praised by poet Allen Ginsberg who called it "a rusty, hellish bombshell over America" and the rights for a British edition were bought by Marion Boyars and John Calder who published it in 1966. Politician Cyril Black then brought a private prosecution against the novel to the Marlborough Street Magistrates Court. The Director of Public Prosecutions decided to sue the publishers under section 2 of the 1964 Obscene Publications Act. In 1967, the publishers were tried at the Old Bailey and the jury verdict resulted in the book being banned in Britain. In 1968, the verdict was overturned on appeal when barrister John Mortimer successfully argued that the jury was given insufficient guidance.
Although he wrote all his work while sober, Selby continued to battle drug addiction. In 1967 he was arrested for heroin possession and served two months in the Los Angeles County jail. After his release, he moved from New York to Los Angeles to try to escape his addictions and finally kicked the habit. He stayed clean of illicit drugs but continued to battle alcohol abuse for the next two years. Also that year, Selby met his future wife, Suzanne Victoria Shaw, at a bar in West Hollywood. The couple moved in together two days after they met. They married in 1969, after Selby and his second wife, Judith, had finalized their divorce. For the next decade, Suzanne and Selby traveled back and forth between their home in Southern California and the East Coast, settling permanently in the Los Angeles area in 1983. They had two children, daughter Rachel and son William.
Life after Last Exit to Brooklyn
In 1971, Selby published his second novel, The Room. It featured a criminally insane man, locked in a room in a prison, who reminisces about his disturbing past. Selby described The Room as "the most disturbing book ever written."
Selby continued to write short fiction, as well as screenplays and teleplays at his apartment in West Hollywood. His work was published in various publications, including Black Mountain Review, Evergreen Review, Provincetown Review, Kulchur, New Directions Annual, Yugen, Swank and Open City.
In the 1980s, Selby met punk rock singer Henry Rollins, who had long admired the writer's works and publicly championed them. Rollins helped broaden Selby's readership, and arranged recording sessions and reading tours for Selby. Rollins issued original recordings through his own 2.13.61 publications, and distributed Selby's other works.