Come in With the Dutchman: A Revised Screenplay Version of the Last Words of Dutch Schultz

“Burroughs’s voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.”—Joan Didion

The layered, idiosyncratic screenplay about one of America’s most notorious gangsters by one of its greatest counterculture icons, available in new cut-up form to readers for the first time

Before he was gunned down in October 1935 in the Palace Chop House in Newark, New Jersey, Arthur Flegenheimer—alias Dutch Schultz—was considered New York’s number one racketeer. Schultz survived for two days after the shooting, in a hospital room that was guarded around the clock. A police stenographer was stationed at his bedside in the hope of learning the identity of his assailant, but instead, he recorded Dutch’s fevered fantasies, images from his childhood, youth, and his life of crime.

From these “last words,” William S. Burroughs created his own fantasia of Dutch Schultz, rife with the dark humor, surreal insight, and ferocious energy for which Burroughs is known. This unconventional script-style novel is one of Burroughs’ most accessible works, marrying the swagger of a classic gangster film with tender explorations of violence, addiction, and the precarity of a life on the margins.

Appearing in a newly edited and reworked version with an illuminating introduction from acclaimed Beat scholar James Grauerholz, Come In with the Dutchman is an exciting new version of one of Burroughs’s most layered and idiosyncratic projects.

William S. Burroughs was born into a prominent St. Louis family in 1914 and would go on to be one of the most innovative and controversial writers of the twentieth century. He was a founding father of the Beat Generation alongside Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Jack Kerouac.

James Grauerholz was a writer, editor, musician, and for decades served as the literary executor of the late William S. Burroughs. Grauerholz was born in Coffeyville, Kansas in 1953 and briefly attended the University of Kansas before dropping out in the early 1970s. Already fascinated by the Beat Generation when he left Kansas for New York City, Grauerholz befriended Allen Ginsberg, who recommended him as an assistant to Burroughs. Over the years Grauerholz developed into a close friend of Burroughs’s and functioned as his manager until the latter’s death in 1997. Grauerholz helped edit several of Burroughs’s books, a collection of his journals entitled Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs, as well as Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader. In 2023 his book The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs: What really happened? was published by Moloko Press. He died on January 1, 2026.