James Leo Herlihy

Herlihy was born into a working-class family in Detroit, Michigan, in 1927. He was raised in Detroit and Chillicothe, Ohio. He enlisted with the Navy in 1945 but saw no action due to the end of World War II. He attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina for two years, where he studied sculpture. He then moved to southern California and attended the Pasadena Playhouse College of the Theatre. A gay man, Herlihy became a close friend of playwright Tennessee Williams, who served as his mentor. Both spent a significant amount of time in Key West, Florida. Like Williams, Herlihy had lived in New York City. Apart from Key West, the primary home of Herlihy was in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles. There, another mentor and close friend was French author Anaïs Nin, who shared some of her most secret diaries with him. ==Works==

Plays he wrote include Streetlight Sonata (1950), Moon in Capricorn (1953), and Blue Denim (produced on Broadway in 1958). Three of his one-act plays, titled collectively ''Stop, You're Killing Me'' were presented by the Theater Company of Boston in 1969. According to author Sean Egan in his biography of James Kirkwood Jr., Ponies & Rainbows, Herlihy co-wrote the play UTBU with Kirkwood but demanded his name be taken off the credits. Herlihy wrote three novels: All Fall Down (1960), Midnight Cowboy (1965), and The Season of the Witch (1971). His short stories were collected in The Sleep of Baby Filbertson and Other Stories (1959) and A Story That Ends in a Scream and Eight Others (1967), a collection which included plays. He later also became a sponsor of the War Tax Resistance project, which practiced and advocated tax resistance as a form of protest against the war. ==Death==

Herlihy died by suicide at the age of 66, by taking an overdose of sleeping pills in Los Angeles. ==Bibliography==