Midnight Cowboy (novel)

For the 1969 film adaptation of this novel, see Midnight Cowboy.

Midnight Cowboy is a 1965 novel by James Leo Herlihy (1927–1993) that chronicles the naïve Texan Joe Buck's odyssey from Texas to New York City, where he plans on realizing his dream of becoming a male prostitute servicing rich ladies. Joe proves a failure as a hustler and winds up on the streets serving a mainly gay clientele, but he does make a human connection with Rico "Ratso" Rizzo, his roommate and would-be pimp.

The novel was made into the successful 1969 movie Midnight Cowboy starring Dustin Hoffman as Ratso and Jon Voight as Joe. The film by director John Schlesinger not only was a hit at the box office, but it won three Academy Awards: Academy Award for Best Picture, Academy Award for Best Director and Academy Award for Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay). Both Hoffman and Voight received nominations as Academy Award for Best Actor, but lost out to John Wayne in a more traditional cowboy movie, True Grit.

Schlesinger explained the great success of the film as its exploration of loneliness. The movie, which was adapted by screenwriter Waldo Salt, was very faithful to the book.

Famous quotes containing the words midnight and/or cowboy:

    Late hours, nocturnal cigars, and midnight drinkings, pleasurable though they may be, consume too quickly the free-flowing lamps of youth, and are fatal at once to the husbanded candle-ends of age.
    Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)

    During the cattle drives, Texas cowboy music came into national significance. Its practical purpose is well known—it was used primarily to keep the herds quiet at night, for often a ballad sung loudly and continuously enough might prevent a stampede. However, the cowboy also sang because he liked to sing.... In this music of the range and trail is “the grayness of the prairies, the mournful minor note of a Texas norther, and a rhythm that fits the gait of the cowboy’s pony.”
    —Administration in the State of Texa, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)