Junky : The Definitive Text of "Junk"

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.

Oliver Harris is professor of American literature at Keele University and the editor of The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945-1959 (1993), Junky: the Definitive Text of "Junk" (2003), The Yage Letters Redux (2006), and Everything Lost: The Latin American Notebook of William S. Burroughs (2008). He has published articles on film noir, the epistolary, and Beat Generation writing and the book William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination (2003). He is currently co-editing Naked Lunch@50: Anniversary Essays (2009) and working on a new twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Queer (forthcoming in 2010).