William S. Burroughs Queer 1985 First Edition Viking Dust Jacket

Description

William S. Burroughs wrote Queer in Mexico City in the early 1950s, in the period immediately following Junky, but the novel remained unpublished for more than three decades. At its center is Lee, Burroughs’ thinly disguised alter ego, wandering through Mexico City bars and expatriate circles while pursuing the elusive Eugene Allerton. Without the heroin that anesthetized the narrator of Junky, Lee is exposed—lonely, obsessive, funny, desperate and frequently uncomfortable to watch. It’s Burroughs before the cut-ups and the elaborate machinery of Naked Lunch, and consequently one of the clearest glimpses we get of the man underneath the literary persona.

When Viking finally published Queer in 1985, Burroughs supplied an introduction looking back at the circumstances surrounding its creation, including the killing of his wife Joan Vollmer in Mexico City in 1951. Allen Ginsberg’s jacket endorsement gets directly to what makes the book so important: Burroughs with his “heart laid bare.” For readers of Beat literature, Queer fills an essential gap between Junky and the radically experimental Burroughs who emerged later in the decade. This is the first edition, first publication of a novel written more than thirty years earlier, complete in its original dust jacket.

An essential Burroughs first edition—and one of the most revealing books he ever wrote.