Naked Lunch

William S. Burroughs was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to Laura Hammon Lee and Mortimer Perry Burroughs. His family was very wealthy. Burroughs later attended an elite boarding school, Los Alamos Ranch School, in New Mexico. The experience was unpleasant for Burroughs, and he was eventually expelled. He graduated from Harvard University in 1936 with a degree in English. He continued to pursue studies in archeology and ethnology and briefly attended medical school in Vienna before moving to New York in 1943. There he befriended Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, two of the most prominent voices of the Beat Generation. Burroughs tried morphine for the first time in 1944 and shortly after became addicted to heroin. Burroughs’s battle with drug addiction would become the major theme of his future literary projects. In 1945, Burroughs became involved with Joan Vollmer, with whom he had a son, William S. Burroughs, Jr., in 1947. After a brief stint in New Orleans, the family moved to Mexico in 1949. In Mexico in 1951 Burroughs famously shot and killed Vollmer during a drunken prank. After Vollmer’s death, Burroughs fled Mexico and spent years wandering throughout South America and experimenting with a psychedelic substance called yagé. This experience would form the basis of later publications, The Yagé Letters (published in 1963) and Queer (published in 1985). Burroughs often cited Vollmer’s death as the catalyst for his becoming a writer, though he had begun writing well before that incident. In 1953, he published his first book, Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict under the penname William Lee. After travelling around South America, Burroughs lived for a while in the Tangier International Zone in Morocco, where he wrote most of Naked Lunch. The novel was initially published in 1959 in English by the Parisian publication house Olympia Press before reaching American audiences in 1962. Burroughs later lived in Paris and London, but he eventually returned to the United States. In 1981, he settled in Lawrence, Kansas, where he died from a heart attack in 1997. He published several more experimental novels before his death, including The Nova Trilogy (1961, 1962, 1964), Cities of the Red Night (1981) and Place of Dead Roads (1983).

The Beat movement gained traction in the 1950s, and its members expressed a profound discontent with American society at the time. In particular, the economic boom of the post-World War II era ushered in a rise in consumerism, known by historians as the “Golden Age of American Capitalism,” and Americans begin migrating to suburbs to start families. At the same time, televisions became widely affordable, and the accompanying rise of mass media served to reinforce society norms and conformity, which Beat artists, including William S. Burroughs, opposed. Furthermore, most of Naked Lunch was written while William S. Burroughs was living in the International Zone of Tangier in Morocco, and it served as his inspiration for the fictional setting Interzone, within which much of the novel takes place. Tangier thus earned the reputation of being a hedonistic and lawless place, attracting several Western writers and artists, including Burroughs, because they were ultimately free to behave as they wanted. In the history of Morocco, Tangier also played an important role in the lead-up to the Moroccan revolution in 1956 because its status as an international zone provided an opportunity for Moroccan nationalist groups to organize and garner international support for their respective movements. Some literary scholars have even argued that Burroughs’s novel Naked Lunch in part satirizes this moment in Moroccan history.

Naked Lunch is an experimental novel that draws on author William S. Burroughs’s experience with drug addiction, drug experimentation, and sexuality, themes that are also explored in his earlier autobiographical novels Junky and Queer. Naked Lunch is most associated with the Beat Generation, a literary movement that began in the early 1950s and lasted a decade. “Beat” writers referred themselves as such because they were worn down and weary about the state of the world. Their writing purposefully broke with convention to more accurately reflect lived experience and the human condition, and they openly and unashamedly engaged with many taboo topics. Perhaps the most famous novel of the Beat Generation is On the Road by Jack Kerouac, while Allen Ginsberg’s Howl is considered the poem that best represents the literary movement. One of the founders of the Beat movement, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, also founded the famous Beat publication house City Lights Press, which published Ginsberg’s Howl as well as many other important works. Ferlinghetti is most well-known for his poetry collection A Coney Island of Mind (1958).