Publication History
Last Exit to Brooklyn started as The Queen is Dead, one of several short stories Selby wrote about people he had met around Brooklyn while working as a copywriter and general laborer. The piece was published in three literary magazines in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Tralala also appeared in The Provincetown Review in 1961 and drew some intense criticism.
The pieces later evolved into the full-length book, which was published in 1964 by Grove Press, which had previously published such controversial authors as William S. Burroughs and Henry Miller.
Critics praised and censured the publication. Poet Allen Ginsberg said that it will "explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years."
Read more about this topic: Last Exit To Brooklyn
Famous quotes containing the words publication and/or history:
“An action is the perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the eye, and to be related to all nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)