Floyd Salas

Floyd Salas is the author of three critically acclaimed novels and an autobiography. Raised in Colorado and California in a family that traces both its maternal and paternal ancestry to the original seventeenth-century Spanish colonizers of Florida and the Southwest, Salas and his older brother entered the world of boxing and petty crime as one of the few avenues open to them for economic survival during the Depression and World War II. Salas later received a university education and creative writing fellowships that opened up a new career for him, while his brother went on to one penitentiary after another and one drug treatment program after another. But, never truly far from the underworld and the destruction of drugs, Salas based his first novels on the drug, pachuco and prison cultures.

His first novel, Tattoo the Wicked Cross (1967), about a boy who becomes a killer in a reform school, won the Joseph Henry Award and was called “the best first novel published in ten years” by the Saturday Review of Literature. What Now My Love (1970) follows the flight of three hippies after they get involved in the shooting of a policeman during a drug raid. Lay My Body on the Line (1978) examines the uprisings at San Francisco State University in the late 1960’s through the eyes of an activist teacher and former boxer.

His latest work, Buffalo Nickel (1992), is an autobiography that reads like a novel. It chronicles his dramatic coming-of-age in the conflicting shadows of two older brothers: one a drug addict and petty criminal, the other an intellectual prodigy. Through intense, passionate prose, Salas takes us through the seedy bars, boxing rings and jails of his youth as he searches for his own true identity amid the tragedy that envelopes his family. Kirkus Reviews called Buffalo Nickel a “piercing and eloquent coming-of-age story (...) Beautifully written, gritty, and deeply human.”

The following are two chapters from Buffalo Nickel.