Season of the Witch - by James Leo Herlihy (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

By the author of Midnight Cowboy: A teenage girl runs away to the East Village in "one of the best and most convincing novels . . . of the Woodstock generation" (Publishers Weekly).

As she explains in her diary, seventeen-year-old Gloria Random is running away from her Midwest childhood home. It's the fall of 1969, and her best friend John has been called up for the draft. It's time to escape the Big Finger, and their mundane lives.

Renaming themselves Witch and Roy, they head to New York City in search of Witch's biological father. Landing in the East Village, they fall into an underground world of mysticism, drugs, and free love as they burrow further into hiding from the realities they left behind.

In his last novel, the iconic author of Midnight Cowboy and All Fall Down captures the heady mix of anxiety and experimentation that permeated New York at the height of the anti-war movement. With his trademark wit and insight, James Leo Herlihy brings together a colorful cast of characters straight from the heart of the countercultural revolution.

"A tour de force!" --The New York Times

"Herlihy writes with an edge of iron." --Nelson Algren, National Book Award-winning author of The Man with the Golden Arm

About the Author

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.