A teenage boy’s image of his older brother is shattered by tragedy in this “remarkable first novel” by the author of Midnight Cowboy (New York Herald Tribune Book Review).
 
Some families get a reputation for being strange, and so it is with the Williamses of Seminary Street. The father, once an outspoken socialist, now keeps to his rocks glass. The mother has a reputation for scaring children. But the older son, named Berry-berry, is the most whispered-about of them all. A traveling vagabond, he’s known for his cleft chin, loose morals, and streaks of violence.
 
Then there’s sixteen-year-old Clinton, who spends his time filling notebooks with every conversation he can overhear, word for word. When Clinton escapes the confines of home to find his big brother, he hopes to make a connection more real than anything he’s put down on paper. But finding Berry-berry in coastal Florida will set off a tragic series of events that will stay with Clinton, and his family, forever.
 
“There is something very wonderful about this book; it has a luminous thing that is the best thing in writing or any kind of art.” —Tennessee Williams
 
“Herlihy writes with an edge of iron.” —Nelson Algren, National Book Award–winning author of The Man with the Golden Arm

James Leo Herlihy was born in 1927 in Detroit, Michigan to a working-class family. After serving in World War II, Herlihy studied art, literature, and music at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, whose faculty had boasted such luminaries as William De Kooning and John Cage. After a professor told Herlihy that he had no future as a writer, the disillusioned Herlihy turned his attention to theater, where he met with considerable success and found acting roles in more than fifty plays over the span of several years. But Herlihy continued writing fiction despite the discouragement he had received and in 1960 he published All Fall Down, a largely critically acclaimed work which was later adapted for film. In 1965 he published Midnight Cowboy, which cemented his reputation as a serious writer. After the success of Midnight Cowboy, Herlihy retreated from the public eye and turned his attention to teaching. He took creative writing posts at the City College of New York, the University of Arkansas, and the University of Southern California. Herlihy died in Los Angeles in 1993 from an overdose of sleeping medication.