One of the most original, influential, and commercially successful American songwriters, Doc Pomus (1927-1991) was a role model for several generations of composers, renowned for his mastery of virtually every popular style, and for the numerous hits he wrote during rock n rolls first decade. But despite his successes, few knew that this writer of jukebox hits led one of the most dramatic lives of his time. Spanning the extremes between extravagant wealth and desperate poverty, suburban family life and the depths of New Yorks underworld, enduring love and persistent loneliness, and touching on more than a half-century of American popular music, Lonely Avenue reveals with novelistic flair the whole of Docs experience-one of the great untold American stories.