‎"BURROUGHS, WILLIAM.‎
‎The Naked Lunch. - [FIRST EDITION OF ONE OF THE DEFINING TEXTS OF THE BEAT GENERATION]‎

‎Paris, The Olympia Press, 1959. In the original green printed wrappers preserved in the original dust jacket. Dust jacket with light wear to extremities, upper margin on back of dust jacket with small loss of paper. A nice and clean copy.‎

Reference : 63191

‎First edition, first issue (with Francs 1500), of one of the defining texts of the Beat Generation and has been compared to both the satires of Jonathan Swift and the religious works of Dante Alighieri and Hieronymous Bosch. The novel became highly controversial for its explicit depiction of drug use and sadomasochism and a scene where a talking anus gradually takes control of a man body body which certainly did not help its public reception. ""According to James Grauerholz and Barry Miles, the editors of Naked Lunch: the Restored Text, Burroughs’s most well known book “evolved slowly and unpredictably over nine tumultuous years… not according to a premeditated outline or plan, but accumulated through a decade of travel and turmoil on four continents”.After his travels in Central and South America (January-July 1953), Burroughs had settled in Tangiers in late 1953, where he continued writing and experimenting with his unconventional text. He seems to have first referred to Naked Lunch by that title in a letter to Ginsberg dated 13 December 1954—but, as Oliver Harris has observed, at this time Burroughs considered “Naked Lunch as a tripartite work consisting of ‘Junk,’ ‘Queer,’ and ‘Yage’.” Burroughs’s correspondence, particularly those letters written to Ginsberg, contains many excerpts, fragments, and the routines that would eventually be added to his manuscript and edited into book form. Eventually, Ginsberg & Kerouac joined Burroughs in Tangier to work on Naked Lunch in early 1957, with the goal to type and edit the various fragments and sections until they had a “continuous and readable” manuscript—the latter survives as the “Interzone” manuscript, and is held in Columbia’s collections. The “Interzone” manuscript was submitted to City Lights for consideration, but turned down by its publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Meanwhile, Burroughs kept writing and editing his text and the version that was finally published by the Olympia Press in the summer of 1959 was an amalgam of the efforts of Burroughs as author and the Kerouac-Ginsberg editing team. (Columbia University Libraries, ""Naked Lunch"": the First Fifty Years) ‎