LITERARY OUTLAW: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS, TED MORGAN

Almost everyone knows three things about William Burroughs: he was a junkie, he wrote Naked Lunch killed his wife. What not everyone knows, however, is the extent to which his life traces a secret history of the 20th century (as a couple of examples show: his maternal uncle was Hitler's public relations officer and his son was operated on by the "inventor" of liver transplants) or how profound and persistent his mark on the arts is. A friend and mentor to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, he stood out as one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation. Although their writing styles had nothing in common, the three shared a disconnect from the prevailing values ​​in the United States after World War II and saw themselves as outcasts in a hostile culture, harbingers of an impending apocalypse. Each of them wrote a revolutionary work of enduring value (Naked Lunch, On the way and Howl), in which they expressed their visceral responses to the upheavals of the time. As a heroin addict, homosexual, anarchist, and criminal, Burroughs felt suffocated in his homeland and chose exile. During his years of exile, during which he resided in places as diverse as Mexico, Peru, Tangier, Paris, and London, he undertook a pilgrimage through the Amazon basin to study the effects of ayahuasca, forged close relationships with other authors such as Paul Bowles, Brian Gysin, and Jean Genet, collaborated with Dr. Timothy Leary on his studies of psilocybin, was one of the first serious researchers of Scientology, and developed cutting-edge multimedia techniques that would have a decisive influence on dozens of writers, musicians, visual artists, and filmmakers, from J.G. Ballard and William Gibson to Kathy Acker and Will Self, from David Bowie and Patti Smith to Throbbing Gristle and Ministry, from Robert Rauschenberg to Keith Haring, from Anthony Balch to David Cronenberg. Meanwhile, his groundbreaking masterpiece, Naked Lunch so shook the literary and social landscape with its detailed and scatological scenes of drug addiction and sexual perversion that it was seized and taken to court, culminating in a decisive Supreme Court ruling that practically ended literary censorship in the United States.

Although a figure reprehensible to many, Burroughs has also been a touchstone for several generations of the most rebellious counterculture, much of which he helped to foster through his pioneering and at times outlandish explorations of the abyss of terror and the degradation of the psyche and human existence. Pulitzer Prize winner Ted Morgan portrays in this biography all the facets of one of the most lauded and controversial artists of the 20th century, an eccentric, contradictory, and daring genius whose story is at times as strange as his fiction. In fact, in many ways, his greatest work may well have been his own life, and Literary outlaw It's an amazing journey to the heart of it.

• Hardcover with dust jacket
• 752 pp. 16.5 x 24 cm.
• Cover by Leib Chigrin
• ISBN 978-84-17645-17-5