[1] Running Dog magazine, a parody of Rolling Stone introduced in Great Jones Street, would later play a central role in DeLillo's 1978 novel of the same name.

Dissatisfied with the life that his fame, fortune, and revolutionary image has bought, Bucky Wunderlick retreats to an unfurnished apartment on Great Jones Street in Manhattan and tries to pare things down.

A spokesperson for Happy Valley Farm Commune, named Skippy, delivers to Bucky for safekeeping a package containing a drug that debilitates the language centers of the brain.

Wunderlick's iconic status in the counterculture, and his privateness, had attracted the attention of Happy Valley, a domestic terrorist organization.

The novel also covers his relationship with the other tenants in the building; upstairs lives a struggling author, and downstairs a mother who is ashamed of her disfigured son and keeps him locked in his room after she was unable to sell him to the circus.