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The Green Ghost , by Chad Weidner, uncovers the ecological context of literary texts by William Burroughs. Until now, much scholarly work on Burroughs has focused on the sensational aspects of his life and innovative writing.  By rereading canonical and ignored texts while pushing the boundaries of ecocritical theory and practice, Weidner provides a fresh perspective on Burroughs and suggests new theoretical and methodological approaches to understanding the work of other Beat writers. Using an ecocritical lens, Weidner explores the toxicity in Naked Lunch, while at the same time teasing out latent ecological questions embedded in Burroughs’s later works. The author’s analysis of unknown and miniature “cut-ups,” texts that have been disassembled and rearranged to create new texts, provides a new understanding of these cryptic forms. Weidner also examines in detail books by Burroughs that have been virtually ignored by critics, exposing the deep ecology of the Beat writer’s vision.   In calling attention to Burroughs’s narrative strategies that link him to an environmental political position, The Green Ghost reveals the work of the Beat writer as a ripe source for ecocritical dialogue.

In the post-World War II era, authors of the beat generation produced some of the most enduring literature of the day. More than six decades since, work of the Beat Poets conjures images of unconventionality, defiance, and a changing consciousness that permeated the 1950s and 60s. In recent years, the key texts of Beat authors such as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac have been appropriated for a new generation in feature-length films, graphic novels, and other media. In Adapting the Beat Poets: Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouc on Screen, Michael J.Prince examines how works by these authors have been translated to film. Looking primarily at three key works—Burroughs' Naked Lunch, Ginsberg's Howl, and Kerouac's On the Road—Prince considers how Beat literature has been significantly altered by the unintended intrusion of irony or other inflections. Prince also explores how these screen adaptations offer evidence of a growing cultural thirst for authenticity, even as mediated in postmodern works. Additional works discussed in this volume include The Subterraneans, Towers Open Fire, The Junky's Christmas,and Big Sur. By examining the screen versions of the Beat triumvirate's creations, this volume questions the ways in which their original works serve as artistic anchors and whether these films honor the authentic intent of the authors. Adapting the Beat Poets is a valuable resource for anyone studying the beat generation, including scholars of literature, film, and American history.

William S. Burroughs is one of America's most influential and widely studied writers. A leading member of the Beat movement, his books and essays continue to attract a wide readership. His films, paintings, recordings and other projects that grew out of his literary production, together with his iconic persona as a counter-culture (anti-)hero, mean his work has become a broad cultural phenomenon. This collection of essays by leading scholars offers an interdisciplinary consideration of Burroughs's art. It links his lived experience to his many major prose works written from 1953 on, as well his sound, cinema and media projects. Moving beyond the merely literary, the contributors argue for the continuing social and political relevance of Burroughs's work for the emerging global order. Themes include: Burroughs and contemporary theory; debates on 'reality'; violence; magic and mysticism; cybernetic cultures; language and technology; control and transformation; transgression and addiction; the limits of prose; image politics and the avant-garde.

William S. Burroughs arrived in Mexico City in 1949, having slipped out of New Orleans while awaiting trial on drug and weapons charges that would almost certainly have resulted in a lengthy prison sentence. Still uncertain about being a writer, he had left behind a series of failed business ventures-including a scheme to grow marijuana in Texas and sell it in New York-and an already long history of drug use and arrests. He would remain in Mexico for three years, a period that culminated in the defining incident of his life: Burroughs shot his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, while playing William Tell with a loaded pistol. (He would be tried and convicted of murder in absentia after fleeing Mexico.) First published in 1995 in Mexico, where it received the Malcolm Lowry literary essay award,The Stray Bulletis an imaginative and riveting account of Burroughs's formative experiences in Mexico, his fascination with Mexico City's demimonde, his acquaintances and friendships there, and his contradictory attitudes toward the country and its culture. Mexico, Jorge García-Robles makes clear, was the place in which Burroughs embarked on his \"fatal vocation as a writer.\" Through meticulous research and interviews with those who knew Burroughs and his circle in Mexico City, García-Robles brilliantly portrays a time in Burroughs's life that has been overshadowed by the tragedy of Joan Vollmer's death. He re-creates the bohemian Roma neighborhood where Burroughs resided with Joan and their children, the streets of postwar Mexico City that Burroughs explored, and such infamous figures as Lola la Chata, queen of the city's drug trade. This compelling book also offers a contribution by Burroughs himself-an evocative sketch of his shady Mexican attorney, Bernabé Jurado.

This article brings queer critical attention to Apocalypse, a 1988 collaboration of ten prints by artist Keith Haring (1958-1990) and poetry by William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) that reverses the apocalyptic trajectory of its apparent, albeit distant, source text, the Book of Revelation. Through image and text these two artists queer the perspective of Revelation, replacing the otherworldly vantage point of apocalpytic with an earthly view, specifically from Greenwich Village, a center of queer culture in the 1980s. This queering of the text, which disorients Revelation's narrative and symbols, involves a critique of phallo-centric culture embodied in white, middle-class religiosity. Haring and Burroughs offer an ambivalent eschatology, vacillating between end-time hope and early AIDS crisis negativity.

Along with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs (1914––97) is an iconic figure of the Beat generation. In William S. Burroughs , Phil Baker investigates this cult writer's life and work—from small-town Kansas to New York in the '40s, Mexico and the South American jungle, to Tangier and the writing of Naked Lunch , to Paris and the Beat Hotel, and '60s London—alongside Burrough's self-portrayal as an explorer of inner space, reporting back from the frontiers of experience. After accidentally shooting his wife in 1951, Burroughs felt his destiny as a writer was bound up with a struggle to come to terms with the \"Ugly Spirit\" that had possessed him. In this fascinating biography, Baker explores how Burroughs's early absorption in psychoanalysis shifted through Scientology, demonology, and Native American mysticism, eventually leading Burroughs to believe that he lived in an increasingly magical universe, where he sent curses and operated a \"wishing machine.\" His lifelong preoccupation with freedom and its opposites—forms of control or addiction—coupled with the globally paranoid vision of his work can be seen to evolve into a larger ecological concern, exemplified in his idea of a divide between decent people or \"Johnsons\" and those who impose themselves upon others, wrecking the planet in the process. Drawing on newly available material, and rooted in Burroughs's vulnerable emotional life and seminal friendships, this insightful and revealing study provides a powerful and lucid account of his career and significance.

Irving Rosenthal, much like his writing, rarely stayed put for long--that is, perhaps, until San Francisco, in the bloom of 1960s communalist living, where his ideals would not only rest but spread freely. If a single dictum to summarize the unfettered character of his life and writing exists, it is this line from his 1978 pamphlet \"Deep Tried Frees\". \"Free strikes a chord in the hearts of the poor--the joy of being invited, rather than prevented, from doing something.\" Born in San Francisco in 1930, Rosenthal attended Pomona College before moving to Chicago to pursue graduate studies in human development at the University of Chicago. In 1958, he served as editor of Chicago Review, overseeing three issues that featured Zen poetry, new poets from San Francisco, and--most famously--a thirty-page excerpt from William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch. A column in the Chicago Daily News denounced the Burroughs excerpt as \"one of the foulest collections of printed filth,\" and in response to the controversy, the University insisted that the next issue be \"completely innocuous.\"

Billed as the \"the main event,\" and entitled, \"D.H. Lawrence: His Influence on Living and Writing Today,\" the conference's panels explored Lawrence's influence on \"the Novel and Short Story,\" \"Poetry and Criticism,\" \"Stage and on Screen,\" \"Society,\" \"Sex and Women,\" and \"the Environment,\" followed by a concluding panel on \"D.H. Lawrence: The Man\" (Ohio State University Rare Books and Manuscripts, CMS 87.35.320).2 To address Lawrence's variegated influences on post-WWII American literature, the festival brought together, in addition to Burroughs, such esteemed writers and scholars as the critic A. Alvarez, the California-based poet Robert Duncan, the English translator N. Scott Momaday, the Dartmouth scholar Blanche Gelfant, the literary critic Leslie Fiedler, the British novelist Margaret Drabble, the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, the Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott, the British poet Thom Gunn, the Lawrence and Hemingway scholar Rose Marie Burwell, and the British literary critic Stephen Spender. According to Anne Skinner of The New Mexican, Fiedler asserted that \"fascinatingly, intriguingly,\" Lawrence's writing \"has not been a major influence on either of the two mainstreams into which fiction has been divided,\" the contemporary short story or the novel (CMS 87.33.308). Connecting the dots between his published and unpublished works, this essay traces Burroughs' interpretation and adaptation of Lawrence's work during his evolution as a writer over the latter half of the twentieth century (Born in 1914, Burroughs only committed to being a writer after World War II, publishing over twenty books before his death in 1997). In the 1960s and 70s, Burroughs' experimental science fiction increasingly highlighted the ominous potential of new media communication technologies to facilitate Cold War America's society of containment and surveillance against those who deviated from the white hetero-patriarchal hegemony.

Commissioner Of Sewers combines interview and archival material, paintings, and clips of William S. Burroughs' film appearances (including \"Decoder\" and Gus Van Zant's 'Drugstore Cowboy' and 'Thanksgiving Prayer\") with footage from Burroughs' last European reading in Berlin on May 9th, 1986 to create a witty and intriguing portrait of the man described by Norman Mailer as \"the only American novlist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.'

This essay explores the literary resonances of the Nobel Prize committee's 2016 citation of Bob Dylan's work \"for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.\" That \"new poetic expression\" has grown out of and developed through a spirit of iconoclasm and estrangement very much in the American grain, and it runs through not only the American folk \"song tradition\" but through the Beat Generation of writers, even as the shape-changing troubadour-poet never was, nor would he ever become a full-fledged, card-carrying Beat poet, nor a traditional poet of any sort, as he became a poet among poets on the road, finally, to becoming Bob Dylan, or rather to creating Dylan, Nobel laureate.