First Line: Joe

The first line of Joe by Larry Brown is

The road lay long and black ahead of them and the heat was coming now through the thin soles of their shoes.

 

A close look at the cover shows that the book was adopted as a movie -- which I have not seen -- starring Nicolas Cage in 2013.

 

Brown was sometimes called a firefighter who became a writer. Here is part of an obituary that ran in USA Today:

His essays and novels, including Joe, Dirty Work,and Father and Son, made Brown a star of "Grit Lit," as Seattle librarian Nancy Pearl wrote in Book Lust, her list of recommended reading.

Grit Lit, she writes, is "Southern-fried Greek tragedies filled with angry, deranged, and generally desperate characters who are fueled by alcohol and sex." His writing was spare, raw and haunting. Pat Conroy once said, "Larry Brown writes like a force of nature."

Brown barely graduated high school on his way to the Marines but always liked to read. At 31, he sold a short story to a biker magazine and talked himself into a writing class at the University of Mississippi, where novelist Ellen Douglas introduced him to writers such as Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff.

After Brown sold another story to Mississippi Review, book editor Shannon Ravenel wrote to ask if had written any others. "About a hundred," he wrote back. In 1988, Ravenel's Algonquin Books published 10 of them in a collection, Facing the Music, to rave reviews. The firefighter had become a writer. 

A local Mississippi newspaper described how Brown became a writer:

After Larry Brown graduated from high school in 1969, he joined the Marine Corps where he served for two years.  There, he devoted many hours listening to countless war stories of disabled veterans just coming back from Vietnam.  Those stories helped the author establish the characters in his novel Dirty Work.  After his tour of duty,  he moved back to Mississippi and worked at several jobs before joining the Oxford Fire Department in 1973, where he worked as a firefighter for sixteen years (Trosky 87).  In 1974 Larry married Mary Annie Coleman, a secretary. .  It was during those years as a fireman that Brown first experimented with writing.  In those early writing days,  he was self-taught and strongly influenced by authors that he admired.  He wrote story after story, submitting them to various publishing houses and receiving  rejection after rejection.  Finally,  his first story to be published was in “Easyrider” magazine, a magazine for bikers.