Author of Last Exit to Brooklyn Dies at 75: “Hubert Selby Jr., the Brooklyn-born ex-merchant mariner who turned to drugs and to writing after cheating death and created a lasting vision of urban hell in his novel Last Exit to Brooklyn, died yesterday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 75…

Mr. Selby had no formal training, and disdained the prim order of punctuation and plot. His writing was spare and direct. But what most marked his work was the stark despair and loneliness he described in such shocking terms that some of his work was blocked for a time in the United States, and later England, as obscene.” New York Times