Entitled Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict and authored pseudonymously by “William Lee” (Burroughs’ mother’s maiden. Junkie by William Lee – book cover, description, publication history. Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (Junky) A novel by William Lee ( William S. New York: Ace Books, No. D First Edition, a paperback original. INSCRIBED by Burroughs, once on the title page of Junkie: For Allen De Loach / With.
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Letters to a Young Novelist.
William Burroughs – the original Junkie | Books | The Guardian
I Agree This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and if not signed in for advertising. The Definitive Text of “Junk. This edition is a highly desired collectible and even below-average-condition unredeeemd have been known to cost hundreds of dollars. Literary Centennials 47 members messages You must be a member of this group to post.
William Lee the donfessions of the author and of all persons appearing in this book are disguised is an unrepentant, unredeemed drug addict. Both Junkie and Narcotic Agent have covers of beautiful garishness, featuring s damsels in distress. You might say it was a travel book more than anything else.
Junkie by William Lee
Home Groups Talk Zeitgeist. Burroughs chose to use the pseudonym “William Lee”, Lee being his mother’s maiden name, for the writing credit. Ace published no hardcover books, only cheap paperbacks, which sold for very little; Burroughs earned less than a cent royalty on each purchase.
According to the original introduction Burroughs had written Junky with the intention to enlighten readers about the true life of “junk user” and separating “junk” from the mystery surrounding it. There has never been a criminal confession better calculated to discourage imitiation by thrilling hungry teen-agers. Junky Penguin Essentials Author s: But his pen has been dipped in an acid of strange lustre, and some of his word pictures are vignettes of compelling artistry.
But I don’t mean it as justification or deterrent or anything but an accurate account of what I experienced while I was on the junk. New English Library Ltd Availability: The introduction by Oliver Harris provides many interesting details about the publication history of Junky including the various suggested titles and publishers’ deliberations rejecting Burroughs ‘ original title.
Generally, American editions used the original Junkie spelling for the title, while UK editions usually changed this to Junky. And just as in these areas junk is “a ghost in daylight on a crowded street”, so his junkie characters – who are invariably described as “invisible”, “dematerialized” and “boneless” – are, like the pseudonymous “William Lee” himself, the sentient residue left behind when the soul has been cooked up and injected into space.
In a thin-as-a-rake’s progress that saw him move from America to Mexico, to Morocco, to France, to Britain, back to New York, and eventually to small-town Kansas, Burroughs was in flight either from the consequences of his chemical dependency, or seeking to avoid the drugs he craved. It provides a fascinating account of the life of a junky, from the point of view of a junky, explaining how heroin changes their life. Burroughs never managed to recover from his addiction at all, and died in physically dependent on the synthetic opiate methadone.
Yet, were De Quincey wrote in the vein of dream-phantasy, ‘Junkie’ is pitilessly factual and hard-boiled. Burroughs on the Road Corso: Besides encouraging Burroughs to write, he worked as editor and agent as the manuscript was written in Mexico City.
The story takes on a more personal tone when the narrator leaves New York. However, in the Prologue Burroughs gives an all but sketchy impression of his life leading up to his life as a “junk”. An open homosexual and urnedeemed drug addict, his quintessentially Midwestern libertarianism led him to eschew any command economy of ethics, while his personal inclinations meant he had to travel with distastefully socialist and liberal fellows.
Coke hit my head, a pleasant dizziness and tension, while the morphine spread through my body in relaxing waves.
Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict
We realized that here was a document which could forearm the public more effectively than anything yet printed about the drug menace. Burroughs himself described it as “the accidental shooting death”; and although he jumped bail, he was only convicted — in absentia by the Mexican court — of homicide. Burroughs and Kerouac collaborated writing a novel together “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks”and Burroughs completed the manuscript of another novel, but Junky.
This topic is currently marked as “dormant”—the last message is more than 90 days old. My wife grabbed the spoon and threw the juhkie on the floor.
Whole Story Audiobooks Availability: Kick is momentary freedom from the claims of the ageing, cautious, nagging, frightened flesh. In a complete edition of the original text was published by Penguin Books with an introduction by Allen Ginsberg; sections of the manuscript referring to Burroughs’s homosexualityaddlct had been edited out of earlier editions, were included for the first time.
This is the unadulterated, unglamorous, unthrilling life of the drug addict.
Her voice was matter-of-fact as if referring to actual incest. Into mark the frug 50th anniversary, Penguin reissued the book as Junky: Much has been written and even more conjectured about the killing.
The definitive text of ‘Junk’ was Burroughs ‘ official debut in Please email webmaster fantasticfiction.
1914: William S. Burroughs – Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict
On the Road Jack Kerouac. When I say Burroughs himself must have regarded the illustration — if he thought of it at aan — as evidence of the magical universe he conceived of as underpinning and interpenetrating our own, it is because the first confexsions of the book was completed in the months immediately preceding his killing of Vollmer on 6 September in Mexico Juniie. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Certainly, the hypothesis of murderous impulsiveness squares better addjct the impromptu “William Tell act” whereby he called upon Vollmer unredeemsd place a glass upon her head, which he would then shoot off than his own bewilderment in the face of an act of such cruel stupidity and fatal rashness.
His first published work, it is semi-autobiographical and focuses on Burroughs’ life as a drug user and dealer. From double book to stand alone; from Ace Original to Penguin Modern Classic; from unredeemed confession to cult novel; from a cheap shocker to a refined taste — the history of this text in a strange way acts as an allegory of the way the heroin subculture Burroughs depicted has mutated, spread and engrafted itself with the corpus of the wider society, in the process irretrievably altering that on which it parasitises.
Views Read Edit View history. By the time Burroughs was living in Tangier in the late s, his sense of being little more than a cipher, or a fictional construct, had become so plangent that he practised the art of insubstantiality with true zeal, revelling in the moniker “El Hombre Invisible”. It was later that same year Burroughs developed his addiction. It is a tale told with pride, as the writers of the Beat Generation saw themselves as an avant garde exploring and experimenting with the use of drugs.
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