William S. Burroughs

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

William S. Burroughs, working with the artist Brion Gysin in Paris in the late 1950s, developed the cut-up technique of literally cutting typed pages into pieces and rearranging the fragments into new sequences, treating chance recombination as a way to break language free of what Burroughs called the control of linear narrative. Naked Lunch, assembled from years of fragmentary manuscript pages Burroughs had written while addicted to morphine in Tangier, already showed this nonlinear, modular structure before the cut-up method was fully named, and Burroughs continued using the technique in later novels through the 1960s.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

After Naked Lunch was published in the United States by Grove Press in 1962, the state of Massachusetts prosecuted the book for obscenity, and a Boston trial court initially found it obscene. Burroughs's publisher appealed, and on July 7, 1966, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court reversed the ruling, finding the novel had literary merit despite its explicit content. The case is remembered as one of the last major literary obscenity prosecutions in the United States, arriving just before American obscenity law shifted decisively toward protecting serious literary work.