After a failed attempt to read "Naked Lunch" I turned to this book to gain some insight into William Burroughs that might aid me with future reading. I did not find that the book went into great detail about Burroughs ideas, except for ones that I find either trivial or even "wacky", like his interest in some aspects of Scientology and Reich's "Orgone Box". In fact, I might have given up on my plans of reading Burroughs after reading this biography; I could have easily concluded that Burroughs was a man who had led an interesting, albeit tragic, life but who, because of his heroin use and open homosexuality, had just become a "trendy" author. I might have concluded that he was a precursor to the cultural revolution of the 60s but of little importance today. Quite frankly I persist in my quest of getting to know Burroughs because of the importance attributed to him by one of my favorite philosophers, Gilles Deleuze, who claims that Burroughs has a lot to teach us about the "society of control". Only my future readings of Burroughs' novels will reveal rather I am right to persist in my study of him.

If this book failed in being an intellectual biography, it certainly succeeded in portraying the world of William Burroughs in an interesting fashion. Burroughs life seems for the most part
a series of tragedies. It appears as though he was molested as a youth and one is tempted - perhaps due to the saturation of "pop psychology" in our day- to conclude that somehow his future misfortunes (and brilliance) were rooted in that event. Subsequently driven from the United States, then Mexico (where he committed the infamous "William Tell" fatal shooing of his wife) he spends the greater part of his life wandering between Tangiers, Paris, London and New York. Oddly enough, he only seems to find some kind ofhappiness at the end of his life in Lawrence, Kansas.

His meeting with the other members of the "Beat Movement", Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, seemed fated, and unlike the others he did not become a "Beat Stereotype but remained authentically himself, behaving in many ways like a conservative midwesterner. Perhaps this authenticity is what appealed to his groupies who could not manage to retain their own identity separate from the various trends in which they participated.

Whether I will find anything intellectually stimulating in the works of Burroughs remains to be seen. Despite his many shortcoming, he was a key cultural force in undermining the foundation of the narrow, cocktail sipping, coutnry club 50s generation.

When I read this book in 1990, or thereabouts, I had only read William Burroughs' book Junky, and I had read nothing by Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg.

After I finished reading Literary Outlaw, by Ted Morgan, I was so fascinated that I read all of Burroughs' novels, and several books by Kerouac and Ginsberg. I also read two more Burroughs biographies, just to get more information on this weird old guy.

Literary Outlaw is just that good.

There are newer biographies of Burroughs by Barry Miles and also Graham Caveney. Nevertheless, Literary Outlaw remains the definitive Burroughs biography written to date.

This is a fascinating biography that reads like a pageturning novel. Burroughs grew up in a privileged St. Louis family, spent some time at a rough ranch-style boarding school in New Mexico, attended Harvard, travelled in Europe, and lived in New York, Mexico, New Orleans, Texas, Tangier, London, New York (again), and finally Kansas. Along the way he became the most scandalous figure in modern letters. His adventures and misadventures are related in this marvelous book.

Literary Outlaw is more exhaustive than either Caveney's or Miles' biographies. Chapters with titles like "Tangier: 1954-1958" and "The London Years: 1966-1973" make for easy navigation. As the book's coverage ends in 1988, there is no information on Burroughs' life in the 1990s, but the essays in the book Word Virus (by James Grauerholz) act as a good supplement, for biographical information.

Morgan did a good job. He wrote a page-turning biography, but not at the expense of Burroughs' literary reputation. Burroughs' value as a writer is challenged throughout, and it holds up. Biographical detail is linked to popular criticism of the texts. There is an extensive section of notes. There is an index.

You can't go wrong with this biography. If you've never read a biography of William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, or Allen Ginsberg, I advise you to try Literary Outlaw. This book is very well written, and is probably the most fascinating biography I have ever read.

ken32

The only book of, or by, William Burroughs that I have read twice. His life was stranger than his fiction.

I just finished reading this book. Not only is it a very fast read (I read it in an hour), but it is also the most touching book I have read in a long while. Any cat lover will love this book. This is my first taste of Burroughs, and I must say it was a wonderful taste. I have been crying ever since he spoke of Ed and not being able to find him. I highly recomend this book for anyone!

From his exasperating need to be at the highest point in the room, to his function as a wrist rest while I type, my cat is a psychic companion. Loki is a classic "one-man-cat", though he will stray when I am not available. This book is so true on many levels, even the wild fantasies... Definitely one for the library.

The Elder Statesman of the Beat Generation is best known for the fantastic creatures of his drug-induced fantasies and nightmares: the Reptiles and Mugwumps of "Naked Lunch", the ramora-like pseudo-human parasites of "Junkie", and others too loathesome to mention. In contrast, in this slim volume, William S. Burroughs introduces us to the real-life creatures who accompanied him throughout his tumultuous career and particularly during his old age. These are his numerous and beloved cats, with names like Calico Jane, Fletch, Rooski, Wimpy, and Ed. Any cat-person will identify with Burroughs' pleasure in the affection and antics of his feline friends and his heart-breaking grief in their loss. But it would be a mistake to label this book of recollections a "Warm & Fuzzy". Burroughs' affiliation with the Cat is on a quite archetypal level. He reveals a recurring sensation from his earliest childhood of cuddling a small, trusting, but long-unidentifiable creature, and to realize much later he was "cast in the role of the Guardian, to create and nurture a creature that is part cat, part human, and part something as yet unimaginable, which might result from a union that has not taken place for millions of years". This resembles the vaguely disturbing imagery of classic Burroughs, to be sure. But there comes to him a startling revelation "...and now the creature is clearly recognized as a cat spirit, a Familiar. I postulate that cats started as psychic companions, as Familiars, and have never deviated from this function." This is a shamanic departure from typical Burroughs or his contemporaries. But Bill's most "off-Beat" book will surely strike a chord with anyone who has -- or is! -- a cat Inside.

I've read a fair amount of Burroughs, and this book is the best of all, the volume that lets you see into the soul of the man. Many of the letters are to Ginsberg, some to Kerouac and others. The stories he tells are funny and scary, sometimes heartbreaking. From these letters you can see where the more imposing material came from, the genesis of the work that came out in the sixties.

That Kirkus review is cheap, trite and obvious. "Godfather of Grunge"? "MTV generations' idea of a literay outlaw"? What's that mean? They were right when they said he didn't come off as a literary "fella"--why? because Literature is phony and an obstruction to truth--"All that is literature has fallen from me, thank God," wrote Henry Miller, and Burroughs exemplifies that. He was interested in Life, and escaping oppression. Little is made of him shooting his wife? Sorry. His heroin cures? Sorry. Save that for all the lame Hollywood hacks who succumb to addiction only because they know their "life story" will sell. I think this is a great book, one that shows the human, caring, funny, straightforward man Burroughs was in a time of even greater hypocrisy and corruption than today. I think he was dead on the mark in the fifties about America becoming a police state.... Burroughs still upsets conventional literary categories, and the only way the "establishment" can deal with him is to joke and condescend and offer him up as caricature, as Kirkus did. Did anyone read the pathetic obituaries of him? They had no clue what he really did. As he said: "We intend to destroy all dogmatic verbal systems." No glot....c'lom Fliday....

If you are a fan of Burrough's cut-up texts and really want to come to understand this engimatic figure, this collection will provide a treasure trove of information regarding his personal life. Although I find it inappropriate to draw any conclusions when I read his words (I respect the Man too much), these private letters cast a different shade from which you can gather some concrete material about what his life, and hence his writing, is really about. Provocative, a clean read, and after reading this, I think anyone will have to reconsider many of their "wacked-out" thought regarding Burroughs, be they good or bad thoughts. He was a complex man, a more complex writer, and just when you think you understand... That's when you realize he's been playing with you all along.

this is an excellent compilation of stories about hippies and their adventures. i highly recommend it.

What was it like in the sixties? Have you ever wondered this? Even if you lived through the sixties. A collection of stories, some sad, some weird, some gross, and some crazy. This book will take you back. The stories are anywhere from a few lines long to a few pages. A truly amazing book, that not only will you enjoy, but will force on your friends to enjoy

Timothy S. Murphy has contributed an extraordinary study, a book that finally does justice to the Burroughs canon, reading his work in the hypercritical line of Swift, Orwell, and Ralph Ellison, an unrepentant political literature firing the engines of social change. Readers of Burroughs scholarship are all too familiar with the widespread academic attempt to "postmodernize" him, of a reflexive poststructuralism which consigns his work to the a-referential abyss of a Robbe-Grillet, or a John Barth, an insular, disconnected fantasy-realm of linguistic wordplay bouncing off the padded walls of introversion. Murphy has arrived to correct these academic non-readers, quick to point out that Burroughs's first book, *Junky*(1953), was nothing if not trenchant social critique, his later, more well-known novels (*Naked Lunch*, the Red Night trilogy) simply a more sophisticated apparatus for exploring these same social issues, the perverse realms of technocratic subjugation, the sexually charged resistance of a socio-guerrilla liberation movement.... The great intertextual encounter is between Burroughs and French uber-theorist Gilles Deleuze, whom Murphy powerfully invokes as one of the few theoretical approaches that can give Burroughs his critical due. When Murphy wrote to Deleuze asking the philosopher's position on the Burroughs corpus, he replied that his own work "'can bear [comparison] on three points (the idea of a body without organs; control as the future of societies; the confrontation of tribes or populations in abandoned [disaffected] spaces).'... [Thus,] Burroughs and Deleuze rely, not on the permanent grounding of truth (and Law) in modernist myth, but on the fluid mechanisms of desire in fantasy for their amodernist utopian drive. [Murphy's] task, then, is to see how such an amodern libidinal or *fantasmatic* politics WORKS in the writings of Burroughs and Deleuze"(7). The sadness of Murphy's book is his revelation that Burroughs was never really able to discover or originate the revolutionary constructs he so dearly wrote after, that in the afterbirth of each new book the scales had to be reset, the war-machine dismantled, the battle plan abandoned in search of *yet* another reality-engine. Yet Murphy's knowledge and scholarly rendition of this trajectory, one of the most critically underrated careers in American letters, has given Burroughs back to us, has rendered the most powerful scholarly defense of his work I've yet encountered. This definitive volume, currently in exile, will hopefully be reissued soon, so that it may reach the wide audience it deserves. (Lately I've seen spine-rolled copies in my university bookstore's remaindered bin, quite disheartening.) It is certainly a text to be taught, to be pored over, to be dearly grateful for.

Alongside the earlier works by Eric Mottram and Jennie Skerl, Mr. Murphy offers the reader an insight into the life of William Burroughs as well an in depth analysis of his works. ''Wising Up the Marks'' is an indispensable work for both the Burroughs's collector and academic historian alike.

I am not sure how this is "representative of Burroughs work" if that is the way the glib untruths of the canned review were couched. Most of the writing in this book is Burroughs using a more direct voice, reminiscent of the style he used for "Junky" and which I believe he referred to as "factualism". Most of the attempts in this book don't engage in the edgy "cut-up" style of a lot of Burroughs other works. I find those efforts to be intriguing art, but many readers find it distracting or suspect some sort of literary charlatanism. My point is not to enter into that argument here, but to clearly communicate that readers who DON'T like Burrough's more well known works, like "Naked Lunch", might actually find this book a better fit for their reading. The book is brilliant. Reading this is all it takes to prove that he didn't write in the more adventurous and experimental style because that's all he could manage to do. It was deliberate. He could have written deadly crisp, linear prose had he chosen to do so (and in this book he often does). Bottom line: even if you didn't like the other Burroughs books you've read before this one, you still might like this one. Get it?

There are few authors I feel everyone should read but no matter who you are Herbert Huncke should be read. He is one of the best storytellers/writers I have had the privilege of reading. His stories of sex, streets, drugs, life and friends bring a humanity to what may be considered by many obscure, degenerate, or just plain disgusting, but Huncke's stories I believe are non of these. They are filled with love, beauty, pain and always truth. He takes the reader into a world they don't always want to enter but when the story is finished we are glad we made the journey and had someone like Huncke by our side as a companion.

Herbert Huncke was the true beat. As WS Burroughs wrote, in The Herbert Huncke Reader, "Huncke had adventures and misadventures that were not available to middle-class, comparatively wealthy college people like...me....Huncke had extraordinary experiences that were quite genuine." The sad true is that Huncke was the type that Burroughs wrote about, but didn't like much. He was real. Burroughs was living on trust-fund money for decades (remember that the $200 a month WSB received from family in the 1950s was equal to thousands of dollars a month now-not a bad way to live). Huncke lived the life that others wrote about, but never live. While Burroughs ate steak and drank fine booze, Huncke was still wandering around Times Square. Read the original beat. He makes the other 'beat' writers seem like the middle-class dilatants that many of them were. Huncke never fought for the fame, the fortune, and the boys. He was just a "junkie on the prow." This book is truly hip.

Previously known for using the word "beat" to the fullest, thus inspiring Kerouac for an appropriation of a very hip literary movement, there was more to Huncke than just a "jive" talker. As we know, Huncke was a full time junky (what a rhyme!) who had more of an affect on Burroughs than any other beat writer. Likewise, Huncke spent most of his life helping out on the Burroughs' cannabis farm and taking care of Bill's wife Joan who harnessed a difficult benny habit. In Huncke's early years, growing up in Massachusetts and NYC, he used to entertain the boys at local cafeterias with his succinct yet street jargon-fulled stories; clearly he had a talent for story telling. This story-telling is pretty much what makes up the Herbert Huncke Reader. Starting with Huncke's journal, Herbert gets his feet wet with short-story writing, particularly focusing on introspective work-outs and clever anecdotes. Then the books moves to The Evening Sun Turned Crimson, another introspective composition altho mainly concentrating on structural pieces depicting street life, hanging with the beats, and drugs. Next to Reader introduces Guilty of Everything, a comprehensive series of interviews plus outtakes from other journals. Finally the book closes with Previously Uncollected Material, the chapter says it all. Sometimes moving other times raw and scatological, Huncke writes with a unique style that is easy to comprehend and is inspiring. Although not as transcendent as his contempoaries (Burroughs, Ginsberg, Corso), Huncke's writing should not overlooked as "writings of a drug addict," or "a subordinate Beatnik." Huncke did have talent (most notably with recitations) and has definitely worked to the fullest by publishing what he could, despite his painful heroin addiction and ostracization. In my opinion he's a second Neal Cassady (more of a inspiring icon) and definitely had a major affect on the foremost Beat's writings despite his own sparse collection; that's why I think this Reader is important.

Two books by the son of William S. Burroughs. Soul crushing sadness. While the Elder Burroughs' writing has an almost scriptural cadence to it, (Bill Jr, says "Naked Lunch" was transcribed), the Junior Burroughs writing is page after page of unrelenting despair and self-pity; well-written, yes, but Darker-than-Dark...In his afterword to the book the Elder Burroughs' describes his son's writing as illustrative of the Cultural Revolution and Dream that was the 60's. Bill Jr's writing shows the 60's as a nightmare and you may feel fortunate to wake from it after finishing the book. And, as so many "Revolutions" of the 20th century abysmally failed, perhaps this was one more revolution we can thankfully see fizzle and fade. In "Speed" Bill Jr. confidently predicts that the long-hair revolutionaries he sees are gonna shake up the world and never sell out...well... Fascinating book, well-written, haunting and exasperating, important addition for folks who collect the Elder Burroughs stuff. Just don't read this book with any sharp objects nearby...

I am a former Heroin addict. Although the author himself does not dive into the horrors of the addiction, he feels the same pain for speed that a Junkie will feel for Heroin. Burroughs, Jr. is a wonderful writer, and I will say even better than his old man. The second book, Kentucky Ham, does tend to fly off of the subject at the end, but his off-the-subject commentary is touching and real, and seems to fit just fine. If you want to understand yer local neighborhood Junkie better, read this book. Oh, hell, read it anyway.

I love and have loved these two books by Billy Jr for years. I have read them 3-4 times and swear they only get better w/each re-read. When you finish the last page of Kentucky Ham (having read Speed first and the second book subsequently) you feel like you and Billy had just hung out together for a little while. And it feels like that evey time you read his stuff. How sad that he was indeed "cursed from birth" and had such a short sad life but how intruiging it was!

This installation into the Nova series helps establish the reality of Interzone, first introduced in Naked Lunch. The Nova Police are the only thing keeping the Nova gangsters from harboring the monopoly on the universe's only source for Apomorphine. Burroughs appears in the novel as Agent Lee, the primary factor for the Nova Police. From incidious mass-poisonings to wild goose-chases across Interzone, Nova Express is an essential bridge between Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine. In my mind, one cant/shouldn't read either of the other two without having read Nova Express as well.

my god, man! Burroughs is a sheer genius. I read the trilogy as well as Naked lunch and the Wild Boys (also cut-ups) three years agoo. This is the one I remember most. I took awhile to read it, and I tried to compete in an interpretive speech with it, but ended up using a piece from The Ticket that Exploded. Every one of these books fascinates me. I also highly reccomend the Soft machine. This got me hooked. I also read Junky, Place of Dead Roads and Queer last year. I am now currently reading Western Lands!!! The man's resume is endless. His genius continues to influence in many deconstructionists today. Look at Radiohead, Andy Kaufman, David Lynch, all of those abstract thinking break down the cell wall artists. They are of a special breed. and this is a special writer!

I won't be as vivid and descriptive as an eel in hot pursuit over gravy, er, I won't be as evil and malignant as Cortez babies, er, want I....EGAD! Start over...

I won't be as descriptive and detailed (there we go) on this review as on THE Wild Boys. This too is a good book, but my least favorite of my collection. It also seems to be the shortest, and less memorable. Parts of it seem to be more preachy than other releases, opening with Agent Lee talking about how the mass media is controlled by psuedo-punk poseurs addicted to controlling the brainwashed populace. From what I remember, Burroughs seems to make fun of these individuals (who have such elaborate names as Jimmy The Butcher, Jackie Blue Note, etc.) who are portrayed as racist punks fooling everyone with actually being the enemy of true revolutionaries. The plans they hatch up to keep the world controlled are amusing.

Aside from this most coherent of writing, the rest is pure Burroughs insanity...classics include the section "Twilight's Last Gleeming", in which a ship is going down and all hell is breaking loose (the immortal line quoted above is said by the drag-wearing captain of that ship). This may come as a shock, but some of the sections actuall bored me...mainly the more scientific information packed parts like the relationship between parasites and hosts, other easily forgettable things. But look past this, and Burroughs knows what he's talking about.

As before, there are some downright beauties and truths around...this may have been from one of the other books since they all seem to flow together as a whole, but I remember a story about a house shifting over a dsert plain and the tenants trying to socialize with lonely lemurs hanging in a tree. There's a great peice of poetry existing right around there. about angry warriors waitng around with their arrows loking for someone to shoot. It just proves that WSB would've been good at straitforward poetry, possibly better than Allen Ginsburg. He actually tried it with Tom Waits on The Black Rider album, remind myself I gotta get that. Wancha all stripped down, all stripped down....wrong album. Point blank, this book is just as worthy/signifigant/brown propeller on a fasion moon as any of his others. Dig? Flat, baby. Flatfooted and pure goulash on my headset tonight. Burroughs, my man...you know it...you...

Fadeout in classic form.

Burroughs takes the essence of Naked Lunch, and this time divivdes it into somewhat a short-story form. The way Burroughs mashes a million different idea into one sentence really makes you feel like you are in the mind of a junkie.

I think if you want to start out reading Burroughs, the best place to start out is here. In my opinion, Burroughs wrote better short stories than novels. Recommendations are Sapre A** Annie (that's only the please the censors), Twilight's Last Gleamings, A Junky's Christmas and Word. Overall an excellent documentation of the twisted mind of one of the most celebreated authors of the last century.

A novel of dangerous ideas, Interzone is literature at its subversive best. Like with all Burroughs' fictions, you'll never think about things the same after this.