Midnight Cowboy (1965) - James Leo Herlihy Audiobook

Written by James Leo Herlihy
Read by Michael Urie
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 32 Kbps
Unabridged

Length: 7 hrs and 11 mins
Publisher: Audible, 2019

The basis for the Oscar–winning buddy film. “There is no questioning the rampant power achieved through shriveling, shattering scenes” (Kirkus Reviews).

Midnight Cowboy is considered by many to be one of the best American novels published since World War II.

The main story centers around Joe Buck, a naive but eager and ambitious young Texan, who decides to leave his dead-end job in search of a grand and glamorous life he believes he will find in New York City. But the city turns out to be a much more difficult place to negotiate than Joe could ever have imagined. He soon finds himself and his dreams compromised. Buck’s fall from innocence and his relationship with the crippled street hustler Ratso Rizzo form the novel’s emotional nucleus. This unlikely pairing of Ratso and Joe Buck is perhaps one of the most complex portraits of friendship in contemporary literature.

Midnight Cowboy takes a well-deserved place among a group of distinguished American novels that write—often with unnerving candor—about those who live on the fringe of society.

Reader comments….”Herlihy demonstrated a great ability to write compact straight foward prose. I was amazed by the way he showed me Joe Buck’s helplessness and confusion without suggesting I look down on him or pity him. It’s obvious that Joe is not intelligent but Herlihy doesn’t say he’s dumb, or even show him doing stupid things, he just gives us a character that’s unable to process the world, to make contact with anything real.”

“Having seen, and loved, the movie “Midnight Cowboy,” I was curious to read the book on which it was based. This is a terrific novel about an amazingly neglected man-child trying to find his way in the world. The whole first part of the novel was left out of the movie, which begins with Joe Buck’s arrival in New York City, and it is important to make real sense of some of the character’s ideas (like that he could make a living off of grateful women since NYC is filled with “faggots”). In the movie, he was played as just plain dumb, but in reading the book I had the sense that he was a person who had received so little guidance from or connection with other human beings, that he knew very little except for what was in his own head.”