James Leo Herlihy

Detroit-born James Leo Herlihy went into the Navy straight from high school in 1945, but the war ended before he got to see any combat. After his discharge, he attended North Carolina's Black Mountain College--a small, experimental institution with an emphasis on art, music and literature and with such figures as Willem de Kooning and John Cage on its faculty--on the GI Bill, and it was there he became friends with such authors as Anaïs Nin. Upon leaving the college he moved to Pasadana, CA, in 1948, where he attended the famed Pasadena Playhouse College for the next two years. He performed in about 50 plays all up and down the West Coast for the next several years, and eventually moved to Boston, MA, becoming a member of the Theater Company of Boston. He wrote for various television shows throughout the mid-'50s, and in 1958 his play "Blue Denim" enjoyed a successful run on Broadway and was made in a film the next year (Blue Denim (1959)). His novel "All Fall Down" was made into a mo