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Hub AI
Hubert Selby Jr. AI simulator
(@Hubert Selby Jr._simulator)
Hub AI
Hubert Selby Jr. AI simulator
(@Hubert Selby Jr._simulator)
Hubert Selby Jr.
Hubert "Cubby" Selby Jr. (July 23, 1928 – April 26, 2004) was an American novelist. Two of his books, Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) and Requiem for a Dream (1978), were adapted into films, both of which he appeared in.
With no formal writing training, Selby used a raw language to depict the bleak and violent world that encompassed his youth, which would go on to set the stage for his early life. His first novel was prosecuted for obscenity in the United Kingdom and banned in Italy, which prompted defenses from many leading authors such as Anthony Burgess. He has influenced multiple generations of writers. For more than 20 years, he taught creative writing at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he lived full-time after 1983.
Hubert Selby was born in 1928 in Brooklyn, New York City, to Adalin and Hubert Selby Sr., a merchant seaman and former coal miner from Kentucky. Selby and his wife Adalin had settled in Bay Ridge. Hubert attended public schools, including the competitive Stuyvesant High School.
Selby Jr. dropped out of school at the age of 15 to work in the city docks before becoming a merchant seaman in 1947.
Having been diagnosed with tuberculosis, he was taken off the ship in Bremen, Germany, and sent back to the United States. For the next three and a half years, Selby was in and out of the U.S. Public Health Hospital (part of a system of hospitals originally established to care for merchant seamen) in New York for treatment.
Selby went through an experimental drug treatment, streptomycin, that later caused some severe complications. During an operation, surgeons removed several of Selby's ribs to reach his lungs. One of his lungs collapsed, and doctors removed part of the other.
For the next ten years, Selby was mostly bedridden; he was frequently hospitalized with a variety of lung-related ailments. The doctors offered a bleak prognosis, suggesting he was unlikely to survive long because he "just didn't have enough lung capacity". Gilbert Sorrentino, a childhood friend who had become a writer, encouraged Selby to write fiction. Unable to have regular work because of his health, Selby decided, "I know the alphabet. Maybe I could be a writer."
He later wrote:
Hubert Selby Jr.
Hubert "Cubby" Selby Jr. (July 23, 1928 – April 26, 2004) was an American novelist. Two of his books, Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) and Requiem for a Dream (1978), were adapted into films, both of which he appeared in.
With no formal writing training, Selby used a raw language to depict the bleak and violent world that encompassed his youth, which would go on to set the stage for his early life. His first novel was prosecuted for obscenity in the United Kingdom and banned in Italy, which prompted defenses from many leading authors such as Anthony Burgess. He has influenced multiple generations of writers. For more than 20 years, he taught creative writing at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he lived full-time after 1983.
Hubert Selby was born in 1928 in Brooklyn, New York City, to Adalin and Hubert Selby Sr., a merchant seaman and former coal miner from Kentucky. Selby and his wife Adalin had settled in Bay Ridge. Hubert attended public schools, including the competitive Stuyvesant High School.
Selby Jr. dropped out of school at the age of 15 to work in the city docks before becoming a merchant seaman in 1947.
Having been diagnosed with tuberculosis, he was taken off the ship in Bremen, Germany, and sent back to the United States. For the next three and a half years, Selby was in and out of the U.S. Public Health Hospital (part of a system of hospitals originally established to care for merchant seamen) in New York for treatment.
Selby went through an experimental drug treatment, streptomycin, that later caused some severe complications. During an operation, surgeons removed several of Selby's ribs to reach his lungs. One of his lungs collapsed, and doctors removed part of the other.
For the next ten years, Selby was mostly bedridden; he was frequently hospitalized with a variety of lung-related ailments. The doctors offered a bleak prognosis, suggesting he was unlikely to survive long because he "just didn't have enough lung capacity". Gilbert Sorrentino, a childhood friend who had become a writer, encouraged Selby to write fiction. Unable to have regular work because of his health, Selby decided, "I know the alphabet. Maybe I could be a writer."
He later wrote: