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- Herausgeber: BrightSummaries.com
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Serie: BrightSummaries.com
- Sprache: Englisch
Unlock the more straightforward side of Junkie with this concise and insightful summary and analysis!
This engaging summary presents an analysis of
Junkie by William S. Burroughs, a semi-autobiographical account of a young man’s struggles with drug addiction. After his first experience with morphine, the novel’s protagonist quickly becomes addicted to the drug, and gets involved in increasingly desperate schemes to get his next fix. His dependence leads to clashes with the law and stints in both prisons and rehabilitation centres, as he cycles between sobriety and enslavement to ‘junk’.
Junkie was the first novel published by William S. Burroughs, and was originally published under the pseudonym William Lee. It was branded ‘obscene’ when it was first published, but has come to be seen as one of the seminal novels of the Beat Generation.
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Seitenzahl: 22
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
AMERICAN WRITER
Born in St. Louis, Missouri (United States) in 1914.Died in Lawrence, Kansas (United States) in 1997.Notable works:Naked Lunch (1959), novelThe Soft Machine (1961), novelCities of the Red Night (1981), novelA key figure of the Beat Generation literary movement, along with Allen Ginsberg (American poet, 1926-1997) and Jack Kerouac (American writer, 1922-1969), Burroughs is renowned for his unflinchingly graphic prose addressing a range of topics considered taboo at that time, from his homosexuality to his experiences on the wrong side of the law, specifically in relation to drugs. Following a privileged upbringing in St. Louis, Missouri and studies in English and later anthropology at Harvard University, Burroughs fell into a life of drug addiction and crime, both of which feature amongst the central themes of his work. Junkie (1953) is his first published novel, preluding his seminal and most celebrated Naked Lunch (1959), both of which are considered semi-autobiographical. Burroughs’ legacy has endured long after his sudden death in 1997, following a heart attack: he is often credited with bringing about significant change to the United States’ once rigid Obscenity Laws through his unapologetically ‘obscene’ works, and many musicians have acknowledged their own artistic debt to the writer, including the musicians David Bowie (1947-2016), Lou Reed (1942-2013) and Kurt Cobain (1967-1994).
JUNKIE
BURROUGHS’ FIRST PUBLISHED WORK
Genre: semi-autobiographical novelReference edition: Burroughs, W. S. (2012) Junky: The Definitive Text of 'Junk'. St Ives: Penguin Classics.1stedition: 1953Themes: drugs, crime, drug laws, homosexuality, addictionBurroughs’ first published novel, Junkie is a fictionalised account of the author’s own experiences as a heroin addict and dealer. Despite initially running into problems upon publication, having been deemed unfit for public consumption, it is today counted amongst the Beat Generation’s seminal literary works. The reader follows the narrator on his journey from New York to New Orleans to Mexico, a dark adventure propelled by intense, all-consuming addiction, despite his numerous stints in rehabilitation centres and attempted self-administered ‘cures’. Burroughs’ fictionalised persona William Lee offers graphic descriptions of drug use and the pain of withdrawal, as well as persuasive arguments regarding the injustice of contemporary US drug laws. He writes with brutal honesty, preparing the way for the graphic admissions of his later Naked Lunch.
