The Letters of William S. Burroughs: 1945-1959

The Letters of William S. Burroughs: 1945-1959 Edited by Oliver Harris (Viking, $25) ''Wherever I go and whatever I do, I am always in the straitjacket of junk,'' author William S. Burroughs wrote to his friend, the poet Allen Ginsberg, in 1956. This is a recurrent refrain of his early letters, which trace his chronic and varied drug dependencies, his ambivalent homosexuality (''a horrible sickness''), and, most of all, his genesis as a writer. Addressed mostly to Ginsberg, the letters contain chunks of the early ''routines'' that spawned Junky, Queer, and Burroughs' masterpiece, Naked Lunch. As a group, they form a picaresque adventure, shedding light on both the personal demons and lacerating misanthropy that inspired Burroughs' brilliant literary highjinks. A