Novel
Naked Lunch
William S. Burroughs · 1959
Synopsis
William Lee, a New York drug addict, escapes a narcotics agent by jumping onto the subway, then leaves the city and crosses Mexico to Interzone, a city modelled on Tangier, where the flesh of a giant centipede is sold and four parties fight over control of men. There he meets Doctor Benway, former organiser of the police state of Annexia, who massages a heart with a toilet plunger. A carnival man tells of the man who taught his anus to talk. The episodes, or “routines”, can be read in any order.
Context
Kerouac found the title in a faulty reading by Ginsberg. In 1957, in Tangier, Kerouac and then Ginsberg and Alan Ansen typed and sorted the routines. In 1959, Maurice Girodias accepted the book for the Olympia Press, in Paris, and gave the author only ten days: Sinclair Beiles and Brion Gysin helped him assemble it. Grove Press published it in the United States in 1962; judged obscene in Boston in 1965, it was cleared on appeal in 1966, after the testimony of Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg.
Who it is for
A book with no continuous plot, made of fragments whose order matters little. Translated into French by Éric Kahane in 1964.
Prizes and reception
Often described as the last great obscenity trial targeting a novel in the United States.
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