Published in , Williams S. Among its disturbing and subversive characters is the sociopathic surgeon Dr. Benway , who inspired the medical horrors of J. Benway provides some of the more satirical moments in the book, as you can hear in the section below, which Burroughs reads straight with his distinctive nasally Midwestern twang. This ambivalence was not lost on writers like Norman Mailer.

The 10 Most Disturbing Books Of All Time



Naked Lunch is still fresh | William Burroughs | The Guardian
A key idea of the Beat generation was to treat the most authentic, uncensored human thoughts and desires as art. Both eventually won their respective trials, ultimately helping to liberate American publishing. Liberalisation was, in many ways, what the Beat generation was all about: from strait-jacketed literature, from sexual repression, from lock-step social conformity. But Naked Lunch is a different beast altogether.


William S Burroughs 101: the queer, gun-toting junkie, in brief
Encyclopedia of Beat Literature. Kurt Hemmer. Er erschien erstmals in Frankreich bei Olympia Press. Naked Lunch — This article is about the book. For the film, see Naked Lunch film.



William S. Burroughs is one of the most pathetic figures in modern literature, his sadness made more poignant because it has been drawn out for so long. And in a recent documentary about his life, Burroughs came across as a man who walks around with something wounded inside, something that hurts so much that his spirit simply shut down. He has kicked drugs, he claims, and is gainfully employed as an insect exterminator.