Junky

In his raw and most autobiographical novel, Junky, also his debut, Burroughs fictionalized his experiences using and dealing heroin and other drugs in the 1940s. The Burroughs-like protagonist of the novel, Bill Lee, seesaws between periods on junk and off junk, using a panoply of substances including heroin, cocaine, marijuana, paregoric, and goof balls. From the tenements of New York to the queer bars of New Orleans, Junky is a field report from the American postwar drug underground, a cult classic that has influenced a generation of writers, and a critical part of Burroughs’s oeuvre. For this definitive edition, renowned Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris has gone back to archival typescripts to re-create the author’s original text word by word.