Boys and Girls Together

Boys and Girls Together is a 1964 novel by William Goldman. The title is taken from lyrics in the song "The Sidewalks of New York."

Goldman says his creative impulse behind the book was his desire to write a long novel:
At the time, all of my friends were screwing up in New York, it seemed. It was going badly for everybody. The city was... affecting all of us, and I wanted to get that down. But writing that novel was a tremendous experience. It was three years of my life on and off.
He later said "the pulse of the book... was the fact that nobody [out of his friends] was making it as I was and I knew I was fraudulent and I knew I'd be found out. It was very hard in those years. It was hard to be 25 or 7 or 8 and to be published when all of your other friends who were writers weren't."
After writing three hundred pages, Goldman took some time off to work on Broadway, and when he returned to the book he found himself blocked, so he wrote another novel instead, No Way to Treat a Lady. Goldman then returned to the novel and eventually finished it despite being in great physical pain a lot of the time.
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