James Leo Herlihy (; February 27, 1927 – October 21, 1993) was an American novelist, playwright and actor.
His novels Midnight Cowboy and All Fall Down, and his play Blue Denim were adapted for cinema. Other publications include The Season of the Witch and several short stories.
Biography
Herlihy was born into a working-class family in Detroit, Michigan, in 1927. He was raised in Detroit and Chillicothe, Ohio. He enlisted with the Navy in 1945 but saw no action due to the end of World War II. He attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina for two years, where he studied sculpture. He then moved to southern California and attended the Pasadena Playhouse College of the Theatre.
Three of his one-act plays, titled collectively Stop, You're Killing Me were presented by the Theater Company of Boston in 1969.
According to author Sean Egan in his biography of James Kirkwood Jr., Ponies & Rainbows, Herlihy co-wrote the play UTBU with Kirkwood but demanded his name be taken off the credits.
Herlihy wrote three novels: All Fall Down (1960), Midnight Cowboy (1965), and The Season of the Witch (1971).
His short stories were collected in The Sleep of Baby Filbertson and Other Stories (1959) and A Story That Ends in a Scream and Eight Others (1967), a collection which included plays. He later also became a sponsor of the War Tax Resistance project, which practiced and advocated tax resistance as a form of protest against the war.
Death
Herlihy died by suicide at the age of 66, by taking an overdose of sleeping pills in Los Angeles.
Bibliography
Novels
- All Fall Down (1960)
- Midnight Cowboy (1965)
- The Season of the Witch (1971)
Plays
- Streetlight Sonata (1950)
- Moon in Capricorn (1953)
- Blue Denim (1958)
- Crazy October (1959)
- Stop, You're Killing Me: Three Short Plays (1969)
Collections
- The Sleep of Baby Filbertson and Other Stories (1958)
- A Story That Ends with a Scream and Eight Others (1967)