Books with author William S. Burroughs

There has been much written about Naked Lunch, so much that the basic facts can be stated from memory: written in Tangiers while the author was addicted to heroin, edited by Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, sold to Olympia Press in Paris and Grove Press in New York, made the author famous and ranked him with Henry Miller and the Marquis de Sade, suffered obscenity trials that ended literary censorship in America, filmed as a movie by David Cronenberg almost twenty five years after publication. And don't forget that Steely Dan got their name from this novel but they claim they never read it.

From Wikipedia: Naked Lunch (sometimes The Naked Lunch) is a novel by William S. Burroughs originally published in 1959. The book is structured as a series of loosely-connected vignettes. Burroughs stated that the chapters are intended to be read in any order. The reader follows the narration of junkie William Lee, who takes on various aliases, from the US to Mexico, eventually to Tangier and the dreamlike Interzone. The vignettes (which Burroughs called "routines") are drawn from Burroughs' own experience in these places, and his addiction to drugs (heroin, morphine, and while in Tangier, "Majoun"-a strong marijuana confection-as well as a German opioid, brand name Eukodol, of which he wrote frequently). The novel was included in Time magazine's "100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005". In 1991, David Cronenberg released a film of the same name based upon the novel and other Burroughs writings.

A long anticipated collection of over 300 of Burroughs’s letters from the early ’60s through the mid ’70s, written to such recipients as Allen Ginsberg, Paul Bowles, and the surrealist artist Brion Gysin, these letters shed remarkable light on the writer’s artistic process and literary experimentation, as well as his complex personal life, in this formative period. An intimate glimpse into the private life of an often misunderstood artist, Rub Out the Words is also an indelible portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most uncompromising literary figures.

First edition, 8vo, 226 pp., green wraps with dust jacket. Green border on title page, "Francs 1500" stated on dust jacket. Number 76 in The Olympia Press's Traveller's Companion Series, one of 5,000 copies. Lower front of green wraps slightly unattached from spine. Small chip to heel of green wrap. Dust jacket has minor chipping to head and heel, not affecting author or publisher lettering and a one inch closed tear from the mid foredge inward. Book and dust jacket are very good plus. Overall a desirable copy of this seminal beat novel.