Junky: The Definitive Text of "Junk"

William S. Burroughs

Oct 2012 · Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

About this ebook

Junk is not, like alcohol or a weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life.

In his debut novel, Junky, Burroughs fictionalized his experiences using and peddling heroin and other drugs in the 1950s into a work that reads like a field report from the underworld of post-war America. The Burroughs-like protagonist of the novel, Bill Lee, see-saws between periods of addiction and rehab, using a panoply of substances including heroin, cocaine, marijuana, paregoric (a weak tincture of opium) and goof balls (barbiturate), amongst others. For this definitive edition, renowned Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris has gone back to archival typescripts to re-created the author's original text word by word. From the tenements of New York to the queer bars of New Orleans, Junky takes the reader into a world at once long-forgotten and still with us today. Burroughs’s first novel is a cult classic and a critical part of his oeuvre.

Ratings and reviews

A raw, brutally honest look inside the life of a heroin addict living in New York City in the 1950s. Burroughs narrates the story from his own eyewitness accounts, where he navigates his way through the seedy drug subculture of Manhattan. His storytelling abilities are remarkable, in my opinion. Burroughs candidly recalls his journey throughout the book with a free-spoken ease that is without fear of moral criticism. This makes for a genuine narrative of a covertly homosexual, educated, middle-aged man with a fondness for morphine & heroin as he descends into a criminal underworld. First, an addict himself, then eventually a dealer, Burroughs tell-all holds nothing back as he ends up committing all sorts of crimes with all sorts of shady individuals to support his insatiable junk habit while being stigmatized, ostracized & judged by the others, specifically, the law. He also does a great job of explaining the motivations of a junkies cynical nature, which have stumped doctor's forever

true description of the brutal life of an opioid addict and the lengths you will go to score dope. all this to avoid the horrible withdrawal symptoms. if anyone has experienced heroin addiction, this book bares the blood stains of true addiction and hoe hard it is to quit even when you really need to.

Maybe it's because the writing style is a bit old fashioned or maybe it's because of the subject matter but I did not care much for this book. The story dragged on and I felt like I was rereading the same passages over and over again, but it really was the main character reliving the sake toes of situations repeatedly. There were some good zingers but that's about it.

About the author

From hipster to so-called Godfather of Punk, William Burroughs has lived a controversial life as a leading member of the Beat Generation and a daring writer of psychedelic literary experiments, but, when he reached his seventieth birthday in 1984, it was almost as if he had been overtaken by respectability. Burroughs was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1914 as the grandson of the man who invented the adding machine and a descendant of Robert E. Lee of Civil War fame. He attended Harvard University. Later while living a bohemian life in association with such Beat writers as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, Burroughs became addicted to morphine and under the pseudonym William Lee published his first novel, Junkie, in 1953 as half of an Ace Double Books paperback. The novel escaped critical notice but may be seen now as the forerunner of his later fiction with its introduction of many of the themes, settings, characters, and amoral postures that became prominent with Naked Lunch (1959) and its successors. Refused by the American publishers to whom Burroughs submitted the manuscript, Naked Lunch first appeared in Paris under the Olympia Press imprint in 1959, the same year that Burroughs was permanently cured of his addiction. Naked Lunch might have remained ignored had not Mary McCarthy and Norman Mailer called attention to the work at the International Writers Conference held in Edinburgh in 1962. Burroughs's raw subject matter and seeming lack of discipline have alienated some of the more academic and genteel literary critics. Naked Lunch was followed by three additional novels about the Nova crime syndicate-The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964), which make use of overlapping characters and motifs. With The Wild Boys of 1971, Burroughs began to develop a new style more accessible to the general reader. Although Cities of the Red Night (1981) received mixed reviews, it was praised by such Burroughs experts as Jennie Skerl and Robert Burkholder as perhaps the best of his more recent novels. Of The Place of Dead Roads (1983) is true to Burroughs's various obsessions with guns, homosexuality, and the terror produced by people who are addicted to power and control. Today much of the psychedelic effect of Burroughs's fiction appears to be an illusion that masks rather deliberate methods of composition. These include "cut-out" techniques, pastiche, and the deliberate trying-out of styles derived from popular fiction genres to create literary montages that owe as much to fantasy and science as to the surrealism of avant-garde literature.