“The envelope of personality was gone, dissolved by his junk-hungry cells. Viscera and cells, galvanized into a loathsome insect-like activity, seemed on the point of breaking through the surface. His face was blurred, unrecognizable, at the same time shrunken and tumescent.”

I know that many hold William S. Burroughs’ Junky in high esteem. Indeed, the 50th anniversary edition, subtitled “The definitive text of ‘Junk’” and bearing several introductions, numerous excised passages restored as appendices, and a hagiographic appreciation from Allen Ginsberg, supports this notion. But his signature style, the “cut-up technique” that produced the debauched Naked Lunch, had not yet materialized or bore any fruit. And so Junky is a mostly straightforward recounting of the author’s life as a drug addict and peddler throughout the 1950s, and if it has any lasting value it stems from the his real-life experience as a dope fiend and his willingness to frankly write about a taboo subject from a perspective that is both firsthand and anthropological. (He also briefly touches on his homosexuality, a matter he explores more thoroughly in his second book, Queer). His ghastly knowledge of the use, procurement, and sale of narcotics, the withdrawal symptoms, rehab processes, etc. offers the reader a voyeuristic peek into a dank, disgusting, depraved corner of human existence, allowing a scared-straight goody two-shoes to vicariously live through the desperate cycle of drug addiction. As he flits around his pharmacopeia and mingles with dozens of sketchy dropouts (frequently summed up by lean, amusing characterizations like “He looked like one of those terra-cotta heads you plant grass in,” or “He looked like a cold, enfeebled lizard.”), one can detect hints of the scattershot work to come, but on the merits of his first book alone, Burroughs surely deserves more credit as a guerilla ethnographer than a literary author.