John O'Brien

John O'Brien was born on May 21, 1960, in Oxford, Ohio, and grew up in Brecksville and Lakewood, suburbs of Cleveland, the elder of two children of a father who ran a business designing industrial machinery and a mother who worked for a bank. His drinking began in adolescence and was a problem from the start; by twenty, his sister Erin later wrote, he was taking a hidden flask to work. He graduated from Lakewood High School in 1978, married Lisa Kirkwood, whom he had met there, the following year, when both were nineteen, and in 1982 moved with her to Los Angeles. So far as his family knew, he took a single writing course in his life. Drink cost him one job after another, and in the sober stretches between spells in detox he wrote hard. In January 1988 he finished a short story, "The Tik", and later that year began Leaving Las Vegas, the story of a Los Angeles writer who sells or burns everything he owns and goes to Las Vegas to drink himself to death, and of Sera, the prostitute he falls in love with there. Rejected by nearly every major New York publisher, it was brought out in 1990 by Watermark Press, a small house in Wichita, Kansas, and dedicated to Lisa. Two more finished novels, Better and Stripper Lessons, and a nearly finished third, The Assault on Tony's, were still unpublished at his death, and his marriage ended in divorce after a long separation. In March 1994 he was hospitalized in Los Angeles in severe alcohol withdrawal. On April 10, 1994, a few weeks after signing away the film rights to his novel, he died by suicide in his Beverly Hills apartment, at the age of thirty-three. Mike Figgis's film of Leaving Las Vegas opened in 1995 and won Nicolas Cage the Academy Award for Best Actor. His sister completed The Assault on Tony's from his draft and notes for Grove Press in 1996; Stripper Lessons followed in 1997 and Better in 2009.

In June 1978 O'Brien refused to attend his high school commencement in Lakewood, Ohio, so his diploma came in the mail. It was made out to John Dylan O'Brien. His given middle name was Steven, after his maternal grandfather, and the swap, a nod to the musician he idolized, set off a ferocious and definitive fight with his father.