Word Virus

With the publication of Naked Lunch in 1959, William Burroughs brought international letters into the postmodern age, but he had already begun to chart the course that would establish him as one of postwar America’s most influential writers.

Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader brings together selections of Burroughs’ most important and challenging work—beginning with his very early writing (including a chapter from his and Jack Kerouac’s never-before-seen collaborative novel, And The Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks) and following his trajectory through My Education: A Book of Dreams.

Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader follows major themes in Burroughs’ oeuvre while also serving up a sampling of his darkly hilarious “routines,” and is edited to serve as a tool for the scholar as well as an overview of his entire body of work for the general reader. Important biographical information, contained in the chapter introductions, provide key links to understanding the work in the context of the life. Ann Douglas’s introductory essay provides further background on Burroughs in the context of American letters and his Beat contemporaries.

Throughout a life that spanned the better part of the twentieth century, William Burroughs managed to be a visionary among writers: he imagined the Internet decades before its appearance and peered into the future of other technologies, kept the pace of world affairs and cultural trends, and, with each of his books, introduced new possibilities for the form. When he died in the summer of 1997, the world of letters lost its most elegant outsider.

Born into a prominent St. Louis family, in 1914, William S. Burroughs 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, whose companions included Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Jack Kerouac.