60 Yrs. Ago

“Junky.” By William S. Burroughs.
$15; Grove Press; 256 pages.

Now available from Grove Press for about what a day's supply o' junk would have run you in 1953, when the book came out.

The main reason the junkie does heroin, despite its horrors and despair, is because it’s better than the alternative: not doing heroin. It is better to be a junkie than to end up what Burroughs might have been, had he followed in his family’s line. The life of an “American business man,” he writes, “is a one-way process. When his organism reaches maturity it can only start dying.”