He studied at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and came to San Francisco as a young man in the early 1980s and published a book of elegant lyrics, Slippery Sins.
D'Allesandro was a member of the so-called "New Narrative" writers, which included Robert Glück, Bruce Boone, Steve Abbott and others.
He reached out to other like-minded writers and contacted Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, Benjamin Weissman, David Trinidad, and Dodie Bellamy.
With Bellamy, he began an epistolary collaboration she was later to publish as Real: The Letters of Mina Harker and Sam D’Allesandro.
A gay man,[1] D'Allesandro died of AIDS in 1988, aged 31, leaving behind a body of work that ranges across various genre identities, from stories of one paragraph to fully developed novellas.