Two seminal figures of the Beat movement, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, discuss intimate personal details and the philosophy behind their influential creative lives in a never-before-published four-day conversation edited by longtime Ginsberg collaborator Steven Taylor. DON’T HIDE THE MADNESS: William S. Burroughs in Conversation with Allen Ginsberg (978-1-941110-70-6, Three Rooms Press, Hardcover, 336 pages, October 16, 2018; $26) has been hailed as a “must-have resource for beat aficianados” by Publishers Weekly and “a beautiful book” by renowned film director Gus Van Sant. The book offers a fly-on-the-wall experience with the driving forces behind two of the 20th century’s literary counterculture masters. The conversation is interspersed with 17 photographs taken by Ginsberg revealing Burroughs’s daily activities from his painting studio to the shooting range. Renowned artist Robert Crumb created a rare new original image for the cover. In the course of their dialogue in DON’T HIDE THE MADNESS, Burroughs and Ginsberg discuss: • the force that drives all creative endeavors • Native American approaches to creativity and imagination • shamanic ritual and the creative process • Burroughs’ cut-up approach to literature • the magical qualities of cats • and much more, including drugs, guns, punk rock, and lit-world gossip The conversation, which occurred in conjunction with the release of David Cronenberg’s film adaption of Burroughs’ groundbreaking “cut-up” novel Naked Lunch, reveals intimate personal history and guiding philosophical dialectic in a magnification allowed by the decades of friendship between these two literary giants. DON’T HIDE THE MADNESS presents an important, hitherto-unpublished primary document of the Beat Generation. ABOUT THE AUTHORS William S. Burroughs was a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author whose influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, including Naked Lunch, Junky, and Queer, as well as six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. In 1991, director David Cronenberg adapted Naked Lunch for the screen. American poet, philosopher, and photographer Allen Ginsberg is considered to be one of the leading figures of both the Beat Generation during the 1950s and the counterculture that soon followed. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism and sexual repression and embodied various aspects of this counterculture, such as his views on drugs, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions. Among his many published poetry collections, he is best known for Howl and Other Poems, Kaddish and Other Poems, and Collected Poems, 1947–1997. ABOUT THE EDITOR Steven Taylor is a poet, musician, songwriter, and ethnomusicologist, and one of Allen Ginsberg’s primary collaborators from 1976–1996. Taylor has published two books of poems and a musical ethnography, False Prophet: Field Notes from the Punk Underground. He is a member of the seminal underground rock band The Fugs, and serves on the faculty at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. He lives in Brooklyn.
Author
William Seward Burroughs II, (also known by his pen name William Lee) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century". His influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films. He was born to a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, grandson of the inventor and founder of the Burroughs Corporation, William Seward Burroughs I, and nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee. Burroughs began writing essays and journals in early adolescence. He left home in 1932 to attend Harvard University, studied English, and anthropology as a postgraduate, and later attended medical school in Vienna. After being turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and U.S. Navy in 1942 to serve in World War II, he dropped out and became afflicted with the drug addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, while working a variety of jobs. In 1943 while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the mutually influential foundation of what became the countercultural movement of the Beat Generation. Much of Burroughs' work is semi-autobiographical, primarily drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict, as he lived throughout Mexico City, London, Paris, Berlin, the South American Amazon and Tangier in Morocco. Finding success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), Burroughs is perhaps best known for his third novel Naked Lunch (1959), a controversy-fraught work that underwent a court case under the U.S. sodomy laws. With Brion Gysin, he also popularized the literary cut-up technique in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961–64). In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1984 was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the "greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift", a reputation he owes to his "lifelong subversion" of the moral, political and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism. J. G. Ballard considered Burroughs to be "the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War", while Norman Mailer declared him "the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius". Burroughs had one child, William Seward Burroughs III (1947-1981), with his second wife Joan Vollmer. Vollmer died in 1951 in Mexico City. Burroughs was convicted of manslaughter in Vollmer's death, an event that deeply permeated all of his writings. Burroughs died at his home in Lawrence, Kansas, after suffering a heart attack in 1997.
