Crimes, deviations from the norm, the transgressive actions of human animals caught in the vises of history, loneliness, desperation, lust, psychosis, exhaustion or terror — these were the subjects (some of them) of Gary Indiana’s fiction, a tremendous outpouring left unfinished after his death on Thursday at 74.

He was born Gary Hoisington in rural New Hampshire in 1950, out of place and at the wrong time, but we all have to be born somewhere. As a teenager he worked at the track, and with his small frame he aspired to be a jockey, but a growth spurt made him just a little too big to race horses.

He studied at Berkeley in the late 1960s and spent the ’70s largely in Los Angeles, a time chronicled in his brilliant memoir “I Can Give You Everything but Love” (2015). In that book he writes of driving the freeways and conducting conversations with voices in his head received as if over the radio. This was how he knew he was a writer.

After he gave himself a new name, Indiana went about inventing a life entirely original and infinitely multifarious: playwright, critic, actor, novelist and teacher. He was my generous friend for 20 years.

At the end of the ’70s, he moved to New York City and wrote plays that he staged in backyards, apartments, makeshift theaters and bars like the Mudd Club. “If you remember the Mudd Club,” he used to say, “that means you were never at the Mudd Club.”

An early mention of Indiana in The New Yorker described him as “the punk poet and pillar of Lower Manhattan society.” “Punk poet,” he told me once, “that’s how they write you off.” Now, of course, it has the ring of an honorific. The culture was always playing catch-up with Gary.