Famous Like Me > Writer > C > Joe Connelly
Profile of Joe Connelly
on Famous Like Me |
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| Name: |
Joe Connelly |
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| Also Know As: |
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| Date of Birth: |
22nd August 1917 |
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| Place of Birth: |
New York, New York, USA |
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| Profession: |
Writer |
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From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia
Author Joe Connelly is regarded as one of America's most promising young writers, mentioned along with contemporaries such as literary stars Dave Eggers and Jonathan Lenthem.
In his work, he has been able to portray New York City's grittier side with the detail of a social scientist. His two novels have been lauded for their musical prose, break-neck pace and dark pathos.
He is best known for writing Bringing out the Dead (1998), his first novel, which was eventually turned into a major motion picture in 1999. Directed by legendary filmaker Martin Scorsese, the screenplay was adapted by Paul Schrader, and though the film was a critical success, it fell short of box office expectations.
Connelly's book -- seemingly autobiographical in nature -- follows the story of a paranoid and hollow-eyed paramedical who works the graveyard shift in Hell's Kitchen, the barrio girding the phantasmagoria of Times Square. Having seen so much human suffering on the job, the main character of the book has turned emotionally into himself, despondent to the point of becoming a legless drunk, his life a personal hell.
Connelly, who dropped out of Colgate University, worked as a paramedic at St. Clare's Hospital in Hell's Kitchen for about a decade before the success of the novel.
On his spare time, he wrote Bringing out the Dead in a small flat in the Upper West Side and was encouraged by a creative writing professor at Columbia University with the project.
When the book was published, it became an immediate bestseller and Connelly, to his outright amazement, saw his novel optioned for about $100,000 as a movie production.
His second novel, Crumbtown, didn't sell as well as the first. Although the book's characters were the trademark down-and-out personalities of Connelly's fabrile imagination, he was criticized for relying on well-trodden cliches.
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