William S. Burroughs
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William Seward Burroughs II was an American writer and visual artist. He is widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a postmodern author who influenced underground and popular cul
Burroughs in 1983
Burroughs's childhood home on Pershing Place in St. Louis
Grave
Naked Lunch
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Naked Lunch is a 1959 antinovel by American author William S. Burroughs. The novel does not follow a clear linear plot, but is instead structured as a series of non-chronological "routines". Many of t
William S. Burroughs
…wife, Joan Vollmer, in 1951 in Mexico City; he was convicted of manslaughter in absentia and received a two-year suspended sentence. His third novel, Naked Lunch (1959), became the subject of one of the last literary censorship cases in the United States after its US publisher, Grove Press, was sued for violating…
1959 Olympia Press edition, with original title
Hell as depicted by Hieronymous Bosch in The Garden of Earthly Delights. During the Boston trial, authors and professors compared Naked Lunch to the religious works of Bosch, Dante Alighieri, and Augustine of Hippo.
Allen Ginsberg (pictured in 1979) inadvertently coined the novel's title. Ginsberg later incorporated the title into a poem, which he read in court during one of the book's obscenity trials.
Critics have compared Naked Lunch to the works of Jonathan Swift, who wrote political satires such as Gulliver's Travels and A Modest Proposal.