Fariña wrote the novel while a student at
Cornell University in
Ithaca, New York. The novel is laced with pseudonym references to Cornell University ("Mentor University") and Ithaca landmarks. Gnossos is a gleeful anarchist, heaving creche statuary off a bridge into one of Ithaca's famed gorges, smoking dope at fraternity parties, poking fun at the pompous, self-righteous and well-to-do, swilling Red Cap ale, retsina and martinis, while pursuing the coed in the green knee-socks and seeking karma. After a detour to Cuba during the anti-Batista revolt, Gnossos returns to "Athene" to become the inadvertent leader of the student rebellion against a university edict that would have banned women from men's apartments. Fariña's agent, Robert Mills, began advertising it as a work-in-progress to several British publishers in 1963. It was eventually submitted to
Random House and accepted by them in April 1965. Jim Silberman was the book's editor. Fariña was paid the advance fee of $5,400 () and its release was announced for the autumn of 1965 but was rescheduled for the spring publishing season of April 1966. The title appears to come from a line in the 1928 blues song "
I Will Turn Your Money Green", by
Furry Lewis, which was included on records issued in 1953, 1959 and 1961. Fariña himself recorded a version of the song with
Eric von Schmidt in 1963. On April 30, 1966, two days after the publication of his book, Fariña attended a book-signing ceremony at a
Carmel Valley Village bookstore, the Thunderbird (to be followed the next day by another at the Discovery Bookshop in San Francisco). Later that day, while at a party, he saw a guest with a motorcycle and went for a ride up Carmel Valley Road east toward Cachagua on the back of the motorcycle. At an S-turn—coincidentally, just above the place on the
Carmel River where
John Steinbeck set the frog hunt that the Cannery Row denizens perform in the novel
Cannery Row—the driver lost control. The motorcycle flopped on one side on the right side of the road, came back to the other side and tore through a barbed wire fence into a field where there is now a small vineyard. The driver was seriously injured but survived. Fariña was killed instantly.
Thomas Pynchon, who was acquainted with Fariña while they attended Cornell University together, later dedicated his book ''
Gravity's Rainbow'' (1973) to him and described Fariña's novel as "coming on like the
Hallelujah Chorus done by 200
kazoo players with perfect pitch... hilarious, chilling, sexy, profound, maniacal, beautiful and outrageous all at the same time," in an introduction to the paperback version of
Been Down.... == Adaptation ==