- New York City Beats
- Howl and Other Poems
- Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict
- Naked Lunch
- On the Road
- The First Third and Other Writings
- Go
- Bomb
- "Let Us Inspect the Lyre"
- "Let Us Inspect the Lyre"
- Huncke's Journal
- "The Entrance of The Grand Gladiola"
- This Kind of Bird Flies Backward
- Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note
After his wife Joan's death in Mexico—Burroughs accidentally shot her while playing a drunken game of "William Tell"—and a trip into the Amazon jungles in search of the drug Yage, Burroughs settled in Tangiers where he fell into a state of drug addiction and spiritual lassitude. After a number of unsuccessful attempts to kick his drug habit, Burroughs succeeded with Dr. John Yerbury Dent's apomorphine treatment in London. Returning to Tangiers, fueled by marijuana and coffee, Burroughs began typing at top speed for six hours a day, letting the pages of yellow foolscap fall to the floor as they were finished. He then called for his friends and in 1957 Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky arrived in Tangiers to help with the manuscript. With the assistance of Alan Ansen, Ginsberg worked six hours a day for two months putting the manuscript in order. Kerouac supplied the title explaining, "the title means exactly what the words say: Naked Lunch—a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork." Fearing censorship due to its graphic depiction of drug use, homosexual acts, cannibalism, and raw language, the novel was offered to Maurice Girodias and the Olympia Press in Paris who eventually brought out the book in 1959. Naked Lunch was banned in the United States, and only after Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer was cleared of obscenity charges in 1962 was Naked Lunch published here. Naked Lunch benefitted greatly from the notoriety of its author, his association with the Beat movement and the censorship trials it faced. Though it initially did not garner a single review from the established press, it became one of the most important novels of the Beat era.
Also included is a typescript of a page from William Burroughs' memoir of his life in Tripoli, Algiers, and most importantly Tangiers, where he writes of working on Naked Lunch and of visits by Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Kerouac, and Alan Ansen. He also mentions seeing Paul and Jane Bowles.