 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).The novel was accepted and published by Grove Press, which had already published works by William S. Burroughs.