Joe Connelly is an American writer, best known for his first novel, Bringing Out the Dead, which was made into an eponymous film.
[3] Connelly was born in St Clare’s Hospital in Hell's Kitchen, where his mother worked and where she had met his father years before (at a dance in the basement).
Bringing Out the Dead (1998) is autobiographical in nature and follows the story of a paranoid, hollow-eyed paramedic who works the graveyard shift in Hell's Kitchen, the barrio bounding the phantasmagoria of Times Square.
Having seen so much human suffering on the job, the main character of the book, Frank, has turned inwards, despondent to the point of becoming a drunk, his life a living hell.
Although the book's characters were the trademark down-and-out personalities of Connelly's debut novel, he was criticized for relying on well-trodden clichés.