Fifty years ago, Norman Mailer asserted, "William Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius." Few since have taken such literary risks, developed such individual political or spiritual ideas, or spanned such a wide range of media. Burroughs wrote novels, memoirs, technical manuals, and poetry. He painted, made collages, took thousands of photographs, produced hundreds of hours of experimental recordings, acted in movies, and recorded more CDs than most rock bands. Burroughs was the original cult figure of the Beat Movement, and with the publication of his novel Naked Lunch, which was originally banned for obscenity, he became a guru to the 60s youth counterculture. In Call Me Burroughs, biographer and Beat historian Barry Miles presents the first full-length biography of Burroughs to be published in a quarter century-and the first one to chronicle the last decade of Burroughs's life and examine his long-term cultural legacy. Written with the full support of the Burroughs estate and drawing from countless interviews with figures like Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, and Burroughs himself, Call Me Burroughs is a rigorously researched biography that finally gets to the heart of its notoriously mercurial subject.
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“In Call Me Burroughs, his authoritative new
biography, Barry Miles avoids unduly romanticizing Burroughs’ outlaw
status…Nor, wisely, does Miles minimize the depth and tenacity of Burroughs’
addictions…Miles’ book is emphatically not, however, the familiar story of a
gifted writer’s substance-soaked decline, probably for the simple reason that
Burroughs’ genius for surreal black comedy tempered with hard, practical
thought never deserted him…Although he occasionally simplifies Burroughs’
story…[Miles’] wealth of detail will make this the go-to biography for many
years to come.”
—
New York Times Book Review