Zu: Hubert Selby, Jr. - Last Exit to Brooklyn (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2000 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3 (A), Humboldt-University of Berlin (American Studies), course: Hauptseminar Words of the City - City of Words: The City in American Literature III: 1950 - 1980, language: English, abstract: Hubert Selby, Jr. - short biography

Hubert Selby, Jr. was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1928. In 1944, at the age of fifteen he joined the US marines. After a few months on harbor duties, he sailed to join the closing stages of World War 2. Two years later, in Germany, he was taken off ship suffering from tuberculosis. The doctors said he could not live more than two months, both lungs were totally shot. He got back to the US and spent the next four years in hospital. That was the time he started reading. By the time he got out of the hospital, he had ten ribs removed, one lung collapsed and a piece of the other one removed.
A couple of years later, he had to go to the hospital again. The doctors were telling him again that he is going to die, that he should just go home and sit quietly and he would soon be dead. His response to this statement was, "Fuck you, no one tells me what to do!" After that he realized that someday he was going to die. He knew two things were going to happen before he died. Number one, he would regret his entire life. Number two, he would want to live his life over again. And he would die. That absolutely terrified him to think he would live his entire life, look at it and say, "Jeez, I blew it. I blew the whole thing." So he got a typewriter and started writing. "This didn't make me a writer, but provided the incentive to discover that I am a writer." So, during this time of bad health, he returned to Brooklyn, started to drink and take drugs and wrote his first book Last Exit to Brooklyn which he finished after six years and was published in the US in 1964.
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