I thought, ‘Wow, this is great!’ Of course, the big steel door shut down, and it was bad from then on.” I would write one of those crazy books and go out and make a film, and I didn’t know what all the complaints about the movie business were about.

“I realize, my God, that was an amazing time, when you could proceed with a certain degree of autonomy and adventure. “Now that I look back at it, the books are all connected with those films,” says Wurlitzer, who lives in upstate New York with his wife, photographer Lynn Davis. For the first time in more than three decades, it’s possible to investigate the interplay between Wurlitzer’s novels and his screenplays, the way his radical experiments in one informed his canny deconstruction of the other. In 2008, the publisher released “The Drop Edge of Yonder,” his first new novel in nearly a quarter of a century earlier this year, it reissued “Nog.” Now come “Flats” and “Quake,” collected together in one double-sided volume (244 pp., $17 paper). His films have found new life on DVD, and the independent press Two Dollar Radio has begun to bring his writing back. These days, however, there’s something of a Wurlitzer resurgence in the works. Wurlitzer did other movie work - including Alex Cox’s anti-imperialist fable “Walker” and Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Little Buddha” - but for the most part he drifted to the fringes, and nowhere more than in regard to his fiction, which quickly disappeared from print. Both were box-office flops, and the latter was taken away from director Sam Peckinpah before he could complete his final cut. But in the early 1970s, he wrote the screenplays to “Two-Lane Blacktop” and “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” which have since been acknowledged as two of the decade’s signature films. Wurlitzer’s determined departure from conventional structure would seem to make him an unlikely candidate for Hollywood.

“Flats” and “Quake,” which followed “Nog” in rapid succession, mine much the same territory, a post-cataclysmic landscape in which heroic storytelling has been blown to bits. Rather than buttressing his sense of self, the journey seems to dissolve it, until what remains is something close to undifferentiated consciousness. In his 1969 underground classic, “Nog,” the narrator drifts across an amorphous terrain on which his shifting identity molds itself like soft clay. Reading Rudolph Wurlitzer’s novels is like watching a road movie backward.

Arturia wurlitzer