Joel Lieber

Joel Lieber (died May 3, 1971, age 35) was an American writer whose novel Move! was adapted into a 1970 film starring Elliott Gould, Paula Prentiss and Geneviève Waïte, and directed by Stuart Rosenberg; Lieber wrote the screenplay with Stan Hart.[1]

Born in New York City, Lieber attended DeWitt Clinton High School and Hobart College.[2] He was the author of five novels, numerous reviews and essays for publications such as The New York Times, The Nation, and the Saturday Review, and a Frommer's travel guide, Israel and the Holy Land on $5 and $10 a Day, which grew out of a year that Lieber spent living in Israel.[2]

Lieber fell from his apartment on the Upper West Side on May 3, 1971.[2] According to the NYPD, he left two notes; the death was ruled a suicide.[2] His final novel, Two-Way Traffic, was published posthumously and seen as semi-autobiographical. The New York Times called it "a sad and bitter novel [that] traces the road back from a crack‐up of Jesse Jacobi, who is, like Lieber, a successful novelist."[3] Kirkus Reviews wrote, "One reads this with the literal discomfiture generated by Sylvia Plath's The Glass Bell [sic]—as the late Joel Lieber who appears here as Jesse says—'I am watching a movie of my own life disappearing.'…This is a sad extension of those earlier quixotic and prophetic novels but Lieber's last book is also his strongest showing up everywhere a ravelled urgency and a frenetically slackening lien on reality."[4] In Namedropping: Mostly Literary Memoirs, Richard Elman claimed that Lieber "was the victim of 'cruel advice,' not from me, but from others to whom I inadvertently introduced him," including a psychiatrist to whom Elman's own psychiatrist referred him.[5]