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Hubert Selby Jr. and the Novel That Dragged Brooklyn Into the Light

Hubert Selby Jr. did not write the Brooklyn of stoops, neighbourhood nostalgia and sentimental homecomings. His Brooklyn is a place of dockyards, tenements, bars, union halls and streets where loneliness frequently turns into violence. Published in 1964, Last Exit to Brooklyn arrived with almost none of the consolations normally expected from a novel. It offered no conventional hero, little narrative reassurance and no interest in making its characters respectable. What it did offer was a voice so immediate and abrasive that readers could almost hear the streets behind the words.

The book developed from a group of interconnected stories rather than a traditional continuous narrative. Selby moves between characters on the margins of working-class Brooklyn: street gangs, sex workers, factory workers, addicts, drifters and people desperately trying to impose some order on lives that rarely cooperate. Among its most memorable sections are “Tralala”, centred upon a young woman whose apparent toughness conceals a far more precarious existence, and “Strike”, in which union official Harry Black becomes increasingly detached from the respectable identity he has constructed for himself.

"Last Exit to Brooklyn should explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years."

Allen Ginsberg's prediction captured something essential about Selby's first novel. Its reputation was built not simply upon subject matter but upon the way Selby wrote it. Conventional punctuation frequently disappears. Apostrophes are discarded, paragraphs can become breathless torrents and dialogue merges into narration. The technique was not decorative experimentation. Selby wanted the rhythm on the page to resemble the rhythm he heard in speech, producing prose that could feel closer to overheard conversation than carefully composed literary fiction.

That language helped make Last Exit to Brooklyn one of the more notorious literary publications of the 1960s. Grove Press published the American edition in 1964, placing Selby among a generation of writers whose work challenged existing boundaries surrounding sexuality, violence and acceptable literary subject matter. When Calder and Boyars published the novel in Britain in 1966, it became the centre of a major obscenity case. The publishers were convicted at the Old Bailey, but the conviction was overturned on appeal in 1968. The case became an important episode in the gradual collapse of literary censorship in Britain.

Selby's route to becoming a novelist had been unusual. Born in Brooklyn in 1928, he joined the Merchant Marine as a teenager and subsequently developed tuberculosis. Years of serious illness and hospital treatment followed. With little formal literary education, he began writing after deciding that he needed to do something meaningful with whatever life remained. Friend and writer Gilbert Sorrentino encouraged him, while the emerging independent literary press provided somewhere for work that mainstream publishers might have considered impossible.

The novel's influence eventually extended far beyond its original scandal. Its compressed urban voices, damaged characters and refusal to sentimentalise poverty anticipated strains of later American fiction, while Selby continued exploring obsession and isolation in books including The Room, The Demon and, most famously, Requiem for a Dream. Last Exit to Brooklyn was adapted for cinema by German director Uli Edel, with the film released in 1989 and bringing Selby's Brooklyn to another generation.

Sixty years after publication, the controversy surrounding the novel has become part of literary history, but the writing itself remains difficult to domesticate. Selby was interested in people whose hunger for affection, recognition or escape had become distorted by the conditions around them. That is why Last Exit to Brooklyn survives its reputation as a once-shocking book. Beneath the brutality is an uncomfortable study of loneliness, desire and the ways people damage themselves while trying to find some form of connection.

💬 FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (FAQs)

Q1: Where in Brooklyn is Last Exit to Brooklyn set?

A1: Much of the novel is associated with the working-class waterfront neighbourhoods around Sunset Park and the Brooklyn Army Terminal, an industrial landscape of docks, factories, bars and tenements that strongly shaped Selby's fictional world.

Q2: Was Last Exit to Brooklyn banned in Britain?

A2: The British edition became the subject of an obscenity prosecution after its publication by Calder and Boyars. The publishers were convicted, but that conviction was overturned by the Court of Appeal in 1968, making the case significant in the history of British literary censorship.

Q3: What other books did Hubert Selby Jr. write?

A3: Selby's later novels include The Room, The Demon, Requiem for a Dream and The Willow Tree. He also published the short-story collection Song of the Silent Snow.