Selby's second novel, The Room (1971), considered by some to be his masterpiece, received, as Selby said, "the greatest reviews I've ever read in my life," then rapidly vanished leaving barely a trace of its existence. Maybe I could be a writer." Drawing from the soul of his Brooklyn neighborhood, he began writing something called "The Queen Is Dead," which evolved, after six years, into his first novel, Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964), a book that Allen Ginsberg predicted would "explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years." Deciding instead to live, but having no way to make a living, he came to a realization that would change the course of literature: "I knew the alphabet. Laid low by lung disease, he was, after a decade of hospitalizations, written off as a goner and sent home to die. was born in Brooklyn and went to sea as a merchant marine while still in his teens.
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