Two of his novels, Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) and Requiem for a Dream (1978), explore worlds in the New York area and were adapted as films, both of which he appeared in.

His first novel was prosecuted for obscenity in the United Kingdom and banned in Italy, prompting defences from many leading authors such as Anthony Burgess.

For more than 20 years, he taught creative writing at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he lived full-time after 1983.

[6]With no formal training, Selby used a raw language to portray the bleak and violent world that was part of his youth.

He replaced apostrophes with forward slashes, which were closer on the typewriter, to avoid interrupting his flow of writing.

It portrays the seedy life (ridden with violence, theft and mediocre con-artistry) and the gang rape of a prostitute.

[citation needed] On 24 October 1964, Selby married Judith Lumino, but the marriage soon fell apart.

As he continued to write, his longtime friend LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), the poet and playwright, encouraged him to contact Sterling Lord, then Kerouac's agent.

Selby combined "Tralala", "The Queen Is Dead" and four other loosely linked short stories as part of his first novel, Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964).

"[8] The novel was praised by many, including the poet Allen Ginsberg, who predicted that it would "explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years."

Also that year, Selby met his future wife, Suzanne Victoria Shaw, at a bar in West Hollywood.

[9][10] For the next decade, Suzanne and Selby traveled back and forth between their home in Southern California and the East Coast, settling permanently in the Los Angeles area in 1983.

"[11] Selby continued to write short fiction, as well as screenplays and teleplays at his apartment in West Hollywood.

In the 1980s, Selby met punk rock singer Henry Rollins, who had long admired the writer's works and publicly championed them.

He had a small role as a prison guard taunting Marlon Wayans, suffering through forced labor while withdrawing.

[14] Selby spent the last month of his life in and out of the hospital and died at his home in Highland Park, Los Angeles, on April 26, 2004, of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.