Last Words
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In 1996 William Burroughs began writing a final journal. He died the following summer after a life of notoriety: godfather of the Beat writers, author of thirteen controversial novels, druggy, dangerous and bleak. Spanning the realms of personal memoir, cultural criticism and fiction, Burroughsâ diaries include anecdotes and memories, entries on his beloved cats and the joys of housekeeping, and musings on drug-taking, humanity and government cover-ups.
âLast Wordsâ contains some of the most brutally personal prose in the William Burroughs canon, and the deaths of his friends, Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, provide a window onto his own preparations for death â a quest for absolution marked by a profound sense of guilt and loss.
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William Burroughs was born in St Louis, Missouri in 1914. Immensely influential among the Beat writers of the 1950s â notably Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg â he already had an underground reputation before the appearance of his first important book, âNaked Lunchâ. Originally published by the daring and influential Olympia Press (the original publishers of Henry Miller) in France in 1959, it aroused great controversy on publication and was not available in the US until 1962 and in the UK until 1964. The book was adapted for film by David Cronenberg in 1991. William Burroughs died in 1997.
