My athletic skills at high school earned me scholarship offers from Boston College, Notre Dame, and Columbia University.

Also while attending high school, a friend introduced me to jazz music.

During my freshman year at Colombia, I broke a leg playing football and was benched for an abbreviated second year. I used my free time to write sports articles for the student newspaper.

Walter Cronkite?

Not Walter.

When my football career at Columbia ended, I dropped out of the university. I lived for a time in New York's Upper West Side with my girlfriend and future first wife. During this time I met some influential authors.

While serving in the Merchant Marine in 1942, I wrote a novel. The next year, I joined the US Navy. However, the Navy discharged me on the grounds that I was a “schizoid personality.”

In 1944, I was arrested as a material witness to a homicide, in which I had helped a friend to dispose of the murder weapon. My father refused to pay my bail, so I agreed to marry my girlfriend if her parents would pay the bail.

Robert Mitchum?

For the next six years, I wrote regularly. In 1951, I completed what would become my most successful novel in while living in Manhattan with my second wife.

However, I had a long and difficult time finding a publisher. This led to episodes of heavy drinking and depression. To earn money in the meantime, I got jobs on the railroad.

Kurt Vonnegut?

Ernest Hemingway

Not Kurt and not Robert (who Landmark guessed earlier on).

After being rejected many times, my novel was finally published in 1957 (after major revisions). The success of my book brought me instant fame.

Norman Mailer?

Not Norman or Ernest (sorry, Laurie ... we must have posted at the same time). Here's the next clue:

But this created enemies on both sides of the political spectrum; disdain from the right, and contempt from the left. I no longer felt safe in public, and one night I was badly beaten by three men in New York City.

My method of writing was heavily influenced by the prolific explosion of jazz, especially the Bebop genre established by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and others.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Maybe George Orwell?

Nat Hentoff?

None of those. There have been some good guesses, though!

The television series Route 66 (1960–1964), featuring two untethered young men on the road in a Corvette, gave the impression of being a commercially sanitized misappropriation of my story.

Allen Ginsberg or William Burroughs?