Repackaged and refreshed, this seminal biography of a counter-cultural icon is re-issued to form a core part of the Virgin backlist: "[Miles's] mastery of Beat Generation know-how must surely be unrivalled."
--Sunday Telegraph

Iconoclast; visionary; homosexual crusader; drug advocate; teacher and elder statesman to Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and the Beats; anti-hero guru to each successive counter-culture generation: William Burroughs remains one of the most complex and controversial American writers of the twentieth century.

A longtime heroin addict, Burroughs preferred to live abroad, away from America's Draconian drug laws. After killing his wife in a bizarre shooting accident, he moved to Tangier where he lived in a male brothel and wrote his celebrated bestseller Naked Lunch -- in Newsweek's words 'A masterpiece. A cry from Hell' -- as a series of letters to Allen Ginsberg. He lived at the Beat Hotel in Paris and spent a decade in London before returning as prodigal son to New York in 1974 after 25 years of self imposed exile.