William S. Burroughs Influence The Wild Party Joseph Moncure March 1947

Description

Joseph Moncure March’s notorious Jazz Age narrative poem—a hard-boiled, syncopated tale of Queenie, Burrs, booze, sex, jealousy and a Manhattan party steadily spinning toward violence. Originally published in 1928 in a limited edition of only 750 copies, The Wild Party became a succès de scandale and was banned in Boston. This handsome 1947 Sylvan Press revival is the large-paper edition designed by Lewis F. White. It was illustrated throughout and introduced by Louis Untermeyer. The limitation called for 1,499 numbered copies for the United States and an equal number for the British Empire; however, the limitation line in this copy was left blank for reasons unknown.

But here’s why this copy belongs just as comfortably in a William S. Burroughs collection as a Jazz Age poetry collection: Burroughs credited The Wild Party with making him want to become a writer. March’s mixture of lowlife characters, sex, drugs, violence, black humor and propulsive vernacular language makes the attraction easy to understand—the young Burroughs encountered a kind of outlaw literature here years before Junky, Naked Lunch and the Beats. Art Spiegelman later rediscovered and illustrated the poem, helping restore March’s nearly forgotten book to cult status. For a Burroughs collector looking beyond the obvious first editions and ephemera, this is one of those wonderful books that helps explain where Burroughs came from.

A terrific piece of American underground literary genealogy—the Jazz Age cult book William S. Burroughs said made him want to become a writer.