All right, buckle up. Ginsberg and Kerouac were both a little out there. But now it's time for the real crazy train: William Burroughs.

William was the son of a wealthy Chicago couple. He was a Harvard graduate, a European vagabond, an army reject, and of seriously questionable mental stability. He even cut off the tip of his left pinky down to the first knuckle to impress a guy he was infatuated with.

Now, if that isn't post-modern behavior—you know, weird, disjointed (pun intendend), intimate—nothing is.

Anyway, like Ginsberg, Burroughs was also gay. But Burroughs was much more troubled by his sexuality than Allen. Maybe because he was older, he had internalized more of the bigotry of Ginsberg's father's era.

Writing Naked Lunch seemed to be one way for him to work toward accepting his romantic and sexual interest in men.

The book did, and was, a lot more than that, though. In it, Burroughs goes beyond the typical confessional style beloved of the Beats. He uses an even more intense post-modern style, and does basically everything he can to make his language seem strange and discomfiting.

One great way he upped his post-modern quota was to use the cut-up technique. This technique was introduced to him by Dadaists, who were a group of modernist artists who were bummin' around in the 1920s.

The technique is exactly what it sounds like: you make new stories by cutting up your original paragraphs, and even your original sentences, and arranging these bits in a random order. See, before all of those boisterous rounds of Mad Libs at your family gatherings, William Burroughs was cutting and pasting his way to literary infamy. Bam.

It wasn't easy, though. Naked Lunch was such an intellectually challenging work, and so unconventional in form, that Burroughs had trouble writing it. He started producing the book in Morocco. Then he tore it apart and reassembled it in Paris. Then he had trouble selling it to a publisher.

It was rejected by City Lights Books, a popular publisher of Beat work, and Olympia Press. But he put together a new final draft with help from Kerouac and Ginsberg, and sent it out again.

Today, it's viewed as a crown jewel of both Beat literature and American post-modernism. See what happens when you keep at it? You get by with a little help from your friends.

Junkie

This novel's about a guy who's addicted to heroin. He sells the stuff, too. And gets into all kinds of nasty pickles while doing that.

All in all, Junky is the kind of over-the-top, spill-your-guts story that the Beat writers loved. We see drugs, violence, and personal evil everywhere on television nowadays, from Breaking Bad to The Wire. It's simply not shocking anymore.

But in 1959, Junky was a radical departure from the traditional Ozzie and Harriet content that most Americans were used to. To be honest, Burroughs's work scared the bejesus out of them.

Naked Lunch

What do you dream about? And when you're just letting your mind wander, what kind of crazy, random thoughts go through your head? Would you ever consider making a novel out of those dreams and thoughts, so that everyone in the world knew what was inside of you?

Probably not. But Burroughs was more than happy to let us into his head. And it's one wild ride.

This book is lewd, crude, and full of drug addicts, prostitutes, and talking typewriters. Not to mention some strange CIA-type agents who are hunting William Lee, the main character. But we never know why.

If that plot doesn't make much sense to you, remember that Burroughs literally chopped up his sentences and swapped the pieces around. And he believed that this cut-up technique had prophetic powers. The rearranging of words in a random order seemed to him to reveal limitless levels of meanings hiding in ordinary words.

Which meanings did you get out of Naked Lunch? Or did you just get stuck and find that you had trouble finishing it? We don't blame you, Shmoopers. It's a tough read.

Still, Naked Lunch changed traditional narrative structure forever. The book is considered one of the greatest works of American fiction… Aside from being one of the strangest collections of sentences you'll ever read.

Chew on This:

Burroughs intended the chapters in Naked Lunch to be read in any order. Not only did he use the cut-up technique to write the novel, the reader is encouraged to use a cut-up technique to read it. How does this non-linear reading practice help define post-modernism? (Big fat question, right?) What does it mean for literature when novels don't have a clearly defined beginning middle and end?

Junky was published as a graphic novel by Ace Books—a publisher who also published crime novels that included material thought unworthy of critical analysis. Junky was largely ignored by critics until many years after its publication date. Later on, as we know, Burroughs's work was elevated to Pro (Killing It) Status. So we think the graphic novels of today owe a debt to Burroughs for drawing critics' attention to books with pictures. Now how, precisely, does a novel like Junky fit into the discussion of what's high art and what's low art? How do literary critics decide what content is permissible, and what content is unfit for analysis? How should they decide?