William [ pseud . William LEE.] Junkie. Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict.

by BURROUGHS

£750 · Offered by Henry Sotheran Ltd

‘You Don’t Decide to Be an Addict. One Morning You Wake Up Sick and You’re an Addict’ BURROUGHS, William [ pseud . William LEE.] Junkie. Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict. New York: Ace Books. 1953. [ issued and bound with :] HELBRANT, Maurice. Narcotic Agent. New York: Ace Books . 1953. Publisher’s pictorial card wrappers; Junkie: pp. [ii], 149, [2 (publishers’ advertisements)], Narcotic Agent: pp. [ii], 169; rubbing to spine and creasing to both covers; uniformly toned, first 2 ff. of Junkie coming loose; old ink stamp of Burkes Used Book Store, Santa Ana, to first page of Junkie; otherwise a very good copy. First edition, first impression of William Burroughs’s first published novel, a semi-autobiographical exploration of heroin addiction, withdrawal, and relapse in 1950s New York. Burroughs, who had studied anthropology as a postgraduate from Harvard, developed an addiction to morphine following his move to New York and began selling heroin in Greenwich Village; arrested for forging a narcotics prescription in 1946, Burroughs subsequently fled to Mexico City in 1949 to avoid United States drug charges. In 1951 – by which time Junkie had largely been completed – he fatally shot his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, during a drunken William Tell-style game in which he attempted to shoot a whiskey glass off her head. Junkie was initially considered unpublishable; after numerous rejections, Burroughs (here writing under the pseudonym William Lee) turned to Ace Books throu

• Binding: Hardcover

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