Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

Moderator---Kathy

This hard to follow story is about junkie William Lee, said to be Burroughs alter-ego.  (William S. Burroughs was a heroin addict and the story was shaped over 9 years of his life.)  The book's main character's continual search for drugs moves him around from New York to Mexico, to pharmacies, and to a hospital.  His drugged state puts him in fictional places like Annexia, Freeland and Interzone University.  Hallucinations, an orgy and even decapitation--among other things-- show up in the story.  You don't just lose yourself in the book, you get out-and-out lost. 

Published in 1959, Time Magazine considered this book one of the '100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 - 2005.  A film based on the novel came out in 1991. Born in 1914, William S. Burroughs was part of the Beat Generation and friends with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.  He attended Harvard, Columbia and was briefly a medical student in Vienna, Austria.  Burroughs accidentally killed his second wife, Joan, in Mexico.  The story goes that he got her to put a highball glass on her head and he would do his 'William Tell' act--something he had never done before--with a gun.  He missed.  He was a celebrated author and also a part of pop culture.  He's on the Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.  He appears near the end of U2's music video Last Night on Earth.  Musical group Steely Dan got their name from a dildo in Naked Lunch.  Burroughs played an aging druggie priest in the 1989 film, Drugstore Cowboy.  Naked Lunch was the last work of literature (a work consisting of words only) prosecuted in the U.S.  In 1983, Burroughs, the Movie about his life was made.  He died in 1997.            

(From our banned book series)

It was first published in Paris with the caveat 'Not to be sold in the U.S.A. or U.K.". Obscenity laws halted its U.S. publication until 1962. Before that time, even an excerpt of the book could not be sent through the U.S. Postal Service. It was banned in Los Angeles. It was banned in Boston in 1965 but the Massachusetts high court reversed that decision a year later. It was banned in Australia from 1960 to 1973 as hard-core pornography. Themes objected to in the book include drug use, violence, homosexuality, anti-authoritative radicalism and pedophilia. It has easily made the American Library Association's list of the Top 100 Banned and Challenged books.

The Un-Naked Lunch included:

Croissant sandwiches of ham and cheese, strawberries and grapes, chips and brownie bites all nicely assembled in a 'clothed lunch bag'.  

Bans/Challenges???

The original ban was brief and understandable in 1959. What is less

understandable is how the book found a publisher back then!---Dee Dee