Hubert Selby Jr.: The Last Exit Out of Red Hook

Hubert Selby Jr Photo Credit: Getty Images

A note from our founder

Our eleventh tribute goes to a writer who came by his subject matter honestly. Hubert Selby Jr. was born and raised in Red Hook, nearly died at sea, and turned to writing only because illness had taken almost everything else from him. What he wrote next changed what American fiction was allowed to look like.

A Red Hook Native, Forged by the Sea

Hubert "Cubby" Selby Jr. was born on July 23, 1928, and raised in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a true lifelong native of the waterfront he'd later make famous. At fifteen, he dropped out of school to join the U.S. Merchant Marine, and it was at sea that he contracted a severe case of bovine tuberculosis that nearly killed him. He spent years in and out of hospitals, undergoing experimental surgeries that removed ten of his ribs and part of one lung. Left with chronic pain and told he likely wouldn't live much longer, Selby turned to writing for a simple reason, as he put it: "I knew the alphabet and I wanted to do something before I died."

Last Exit to Brooklyn

With no formal training, Selby began writing about the dark, unvarnished underbelly of the mid-century Brooklyn waterfront he knew from the inside. His debut novel, Last Exit to Brooklyn, published in 1964, shocked the literary world on arrival. Written in a raw, stream-of-consciousness style that replaced standard punctuation with slashes and ignored paragraph breaks altogether, it exposed the harrowing realities of addiction, violence, and sex work in Brooklyn with a bluntness few readers were prepared for. The book was controversial enough to face obscenity trials in both the United Kingdom and Italy.

Empathy for the Damned

What set Selby apart wasn't just the subject matter — it was his refusal to judge any of it. His fiction mapped, with real precision, how the human mind rationalizes its own self-destruction, and he extended a strange, steady empathy to characters most writers would have simply condemned.

Los Angeles and a New Audience

Later in life, Selby relocated to Los Angeles, where he taught creative writing at the University of Southern California. His work found an entirely new generation of readers when director Darren Aronofsky adapted his second masterpiece, Requiem for a Dream, into a cult classic film. Selby died of chronic lung disease in Los Angeles on April 26, 2004, at the age of 75.

Bibliography

Fiction & Cult Classics

• Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) — His explosive debut, a collection of six interconnected stories set around a bleak, mid-century Brooklyn army terminal, capturing the desperate lives of dockworkers, drag queens, union thugs, and addicts.

  
  

• The Room (1971) — Widely considered his darkest and most disturbing novel, centering on a deeply unhinged man locked in a prison cell who passes the time constructing incredibly graphic, sadistic fantasies of revenge against the cops who arrested him.

  
  

• The Demon (1976) — A tense psychological character study following a successful, white-collar Manhattan businessman whose secret, obsessive need for casual sex and petty crimes slowly spirals into total madness and ruin.

  
  

• Requiem for a Dream (1978) — His legendary masterpiece tracking the intersecting lives of four individuals — three young heroin dealers in Coney Island and an elderly mother hooked on prescription diet pills — as their dreams are systematically destroyed by addiction.

  
  

• The Willow Tree (1998) — A late-career novel set in New York City, exploring themes of deep forgiveness and spiritual survival through a brutalized Black teenager who is taken in by an elderly Holocaust survivor.

  
  

• Waiting Period (2002) — His final novel, a dark, satirical monologue following a deeply depressed man who buys a gun to kill himself, but decides to use it to murder corrupt bureaucrats and authority figures instead during his mandated waiting period.

Short Stories

• Song of the Silent Snow (1986) — A collection of fifteen shorter pieces written over two decades, showing a gentler, more quietly melancholic side of his writing, though still rooted in the struggles of regular people.

READ SHELBY

Start with Last Exit to Brooklyn if you want the book that made his name, or Requiem for a Dream if the film brought you here first. Either one will take you straight back to the Red Hook waterfront that shaped Selby long before he ever put a word on the page. Get the book.

As an Amazon Associate, Brooklyn Writers Press may earn from qualifying purchases made through links on this site. This comes at no additional cost to you and helps support our work honoring writers like Hubert Selby Jr.