Paul Morrissey was born on February 23, 1938, in Manhattan. His father was a Bronx lawyer. An ancestor founded the Drummond detective agency, which was a forerunner of the Secret Service in Lincoln's day, and which provided the model for the fictional Bulldog Drummond. On his mother's side, the Morans, an uncle was vice-mayor under John F. Hylan in the twenties and became the mayor's scapegoat in a scandal involving pavement blocks. Paul has one sister and three brothers, the latter all independents in small construction businesses. “Like me, they don't like working for others.”

He grew up in Yonkers, across from the Woodlawn section of the Bronx. His turf was a unique enclave, separated from the city by natural boundaries on all sides: the Bronx River Valley, Van Cortlandt Park, and the huge Woodlawn cemetery. The moral and psychological function of the urban landscape became important themes in his Flesh trilogy and in his later street life features, Forty-Deuce, Mixed Blood, and Spike of Bensonhurst.

Morrissey was educated entirely within the Catholic system, which he considers “the best thing that ever happened to me.” Nuns taught him for eight years – well and toughly – at St. Barnabas School. He continued under almost totally Jesuit tutelage at Fordham Prep and at Fordham University, where he majored in English. Morrissey dismisses as “a grotesque absurdity” the representation of the Catholic school system as sadistic rote learning.