Junkie (novel)

Junkie

1953 Ace Double edition, credited to William Lee.
Author	William S. Burroughs
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Semi-autobiographical novel
Publisher	Ace Books
Publication date	1953
Media type	Print (Paperback)
Pages	166
ISBN	(reprint)
OCLC	51086068
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 21
LC Class	PS3552.U75 J86 2003
Followed by	Queer

Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (originally titled Junk, later released as Junky) is a novel by American beat generation writer William S. Burroughs, published initially under the pseudonym William Lee in 1953. His first published work, it is semi-autobiographical and focuses on Burroughs' life as a drug user and dealer. It has come to be considered a seminal text on the lifestyle of heroin addicts in the early 1950s.

The novel was considered unpublishable more than it was controversial. Burroughs began it largely at the request and insistence of Allen Ginsberg, who was impressed by Burroughs’s letter-writing skill. Burroughs took up the task with little enthusiasm. However, partly because he saw that becoming a publishable writer was possible (his friend Jack Kerouac had published his first novel The Town and the City in 1950), he began to compile his experiences as an addict, ‘lush roller’ and small-time Greenwich Village heroin pusher.

Although long considered Burroughs' first novel, he had in fact several years earlier completed a manuscript called And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks with Kerouac, but this work would remain unpublished in its entirety until 2008.

Burroughs's work would not have been published but for Allen Ginsberg’s determination. Besides encouraging Burroughs to write, he worked as editor and agent as the manuscript was written in Mexico City. Queer, the companion piece to Junkie, was written at the same time and parts of it were designed to be included in Junkie, since the first manuscript was dismissed as poorly written and lacking in interest and insight. After many rejection letters, Burroughs stopped writing.

Ginsberg found a publisher in a psychiatric hospital in New Jersey. He had admitted himself to a Hoboken hospital after getting kicked out of Columbia University. A. A. Wyn, who owned Ace Books, was pressured to consider the work upon the insistence of his nephew, Carl Solomon, who had been hospitalized in the same facility as Ginsberg. With this news, Ginsberg forced Burroughs to revisit the text. Ginsberg soothed Burroughs's indignation at the necessary edits, and was able to finally place the novel with the New York publishing house.