BURROUGHS, William [pseud. William LEE.] Junkie. Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict.

‘You Don’t Decide to Be an Addict. One Morning You Wake Up Sick and You’re an Addict’

BURROUGHS, William [pseud. William LEE.] Junkie. Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict. New York: Ace Books.1953.

[issued and bound with:]

HELBRANT, Maurice. Narcotic Agent. New York: Ace Books. 1953.

Publisher’s pictorial card wrappers; Junkie: pp. [ii], 149, [2 (publishers’ advertisements)], Narcotic Agent: pp. [ii], 169; rubbing to spine and creasing to both covers; uniformly toned, first 2 ff. of Junkie coming loose; old ink stamp of Burkes Used Book Store, Santa Ana, to first page of Junkie; otherwise a very good copy.

First edition, first impression of William Burroughs’s first published novel, a semi-autobiographical exploration of heroin addiction, withdrawal, and relapse in 1950s New York.

Burroughs, who had studied anthropology as a postgraduate from Harvard, developed an addiction to morphine following his move to New York and began selling heroin in Greenwich Village; arrested for forging a narcotics prescription in 1946, Burroughs subsequently fled to Mexico City in 1949 to avoid United States drug charges. In 1951 – by which time Junkie had largely been completed – he fatally shot his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, during a drunken William Tell-style game in which he attempted to shoot a whiskey glass off her head.

Junkie was initially considered unpublishable; after numerous rejections, Burroughs (here writing under the pseudonym William Lee) turned to Ace Books through Carl Solomon (to whom Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ is dedicated), a printer of cheap pulp fiction, Solomon’s uncle being the owner of the publishing firm; Ace had rejected Kerouac’s On the Road, and only published Junkie on the condition that its language would be censored.

It is printed dos-à-dos with the largely forgotten Narcotic Agent by Maurice Helbrant, an autobiographical account of the author’s work as an undercover agent for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Considering the disposable intention of the pulp novel, our copy is in uncommonly good condition.

SKU: 2122792