World on the fringes of writer Selby

Selby's works focused on the underbelly of American life

Hubert Selby Jr, who has died aged 75, has been described as one of America's most influential writers.

Selby has been compared to William Burroughs and Joseph Heller for his uncompromising prose and the scale of his impact as a US author.

He will probably be best remembered for his debut novel, Last Exit To Brooklyn, a story of urban brutality set in a wasteland inhabited by characters existing on the fringes of society.

It caused a storm on its publication in 1964 for its stark language and bleak storyline of prostitutes and gang members.

At a time when US society was regarded as the epitome of wholesome family life, the book was notable for its daring depiction of a previously hidden underclass consisting of thieves, drug addicts and misfits.

Using material drawn from his experiences growing up in the New York borough, the book became a cult classic but split the critics.

Writer Allen Ginsberg hailed Selby's debut novel

Allen Ginsberg, the New York beat poet, said it would "explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years".

A review in The Times stated: "This is a brutal book - shocking, exhausting, depressing"; yet the New York Times called it "an extraordinary achievement... with a vision of hell so stern that it cannot be chucked or raged aside".

In 1989 it was turned into a film by Uli Edel, starring Jennifer Jason Leigh and Stephen Lang, set against a backdrop of violence and corruption in 1950s Brooklyn. Like the book, it became cult viewing.

Selby's other best-known work was Requiem For A Dream, a harrowing account of heroin addiction informed by his own problems with substance abuse: he had become addicted to morphine during treatment for tuberculosis.

On its publication in 1978, the New York Times Book Review said it cemented Selby's place in the "front rank" of American novelists.

Jennifer Jason Leigh starred in the film version of Last Exit To Brooklyn

It, too, was made into a film, released in 2000, starring Ellen Burstyn and Jennifer Connelly. Directed by Darren Aronofsky, it portrayed the tragic downward spiral of four once-ambitious individuals consumed by their addictions.

Years before the plaudits afforded to Selby by new generations of film-going fans, critics had been in thrall of his lesser-known second novel, The Room, published in 1971.

It received what Selby called "the greatest reviews I've ever read in my life", then promptly vanished leaving barely a trace of its existence.

Typically dark and claustrophobic, it centred on a petty criminal locked in a remand cell harbouring feelings of impotence, hatred and rage, and fantasising about revenge.

Selby's foray into literature began as a teenager when he was sent home from the merchant marines, critically ill with tuberculosis, during World War II.

Spending a year in hospital having survived radical surgery, he began writing the work that would later develop in to Last Exit To Brooklyn.

A high school dropout, Selby was teaching a writing class at the University of Southern California until his death.