by William S. Burroughs, Penguin Books, 1977, 176 pages: Author William S. Burroughs had a unique perspective on almost everything he perceived, including drugs, sexuality and the American dream. He nursed a serious heroin habit for several years, and yet emerged to pioneer the Beat movement of the 1950s and cement himself in popular culture. His first book, “Junky,” offers a candid look into the making of an addict—and an author.
The novel serves as a dry, emotionless report on the life of a typical heroin addict. Burroughs describes shooting junk the way someone else might describe making toast. His analysis is utterly objective and stoical, detailing depraved acts with indifferent, laconic prose. And yet, somehow, his dead-pan approach makes the text all the more captivating. It flatly illuminates a lifestyle most people don’t even attempt to imagine, like the daily ledger of a Martian store clerk. 
The protagonist is Bill Lee, a thinly veiled version of Burroughs, whose fascination with crime leads him to begin tampering with morphine and heroin in New York. He soon develops a full-blown addiction and drifts first to Texas and then to New Orleans, continually on the run from the law and himself.
Lee repeatedly attempts to kick his junk habit, using a variety of ill-fated withdrawal methods. At one point, he substitutes tequila for heroin, hoping to wean himself off the narcotic by staying permanently drunk. The tactic proves faulty, as he stoops to even greater depravity and violence on the bottle than he did on the needle. The fact that he is a husband and father rarely enters the picture.
The novel was originally published in 1953 as “Junkie,” under the pen name William Lee. Had it not been for Allen Ginsberg and his lover Carl Solomon, the book may never have materialized. It was Ginsberg who encouraged Burroughs to forge ahead with his debut novel, and Solomon who convinced his uncle A. A. Wyn, publisher of Ace Books, to publish the finished work. Ace specialized in detective books, and “Junkie” was initially packaged with the memoirs of a narcotics agent.
While it garnered little attention upon its first printing, “Junky” would become a vital piece of mid 20th century literature, both as a launching pad for Burroughs and the Beat Generation, and as a graphic illustration of addiction. In a way, it also captured the consumerist culture of the 1950s, presenting junk as the ultimate product. 
While “Junky” is more easily readable than Burroughs’ later novels, such as his master work “Naked Lunch,” it was considered damn near unpublishable when he wrote it in the early 1950s. Here was a mostly autobiographical account of an unrepentant heroin addict and drug peddler who also happened to be bisexual (a theme brought out further in his follow-up novel, “Queer”).
In his prologue to the book, Burroughs writes that he has never regretted his experience with drugs. In fact, he appears to have believed that intermittent heroin use made him both healthier and wiser.
“I have learned a great deal from using junk,” Burroughs writes. “I have seen life measured out in eyedroppers of morphine solution. I experienced the agonizing deprivation of junk sickness, and the pleasure of relief when junk-thirsty cells drank from the needle. Perhaps all pleasure is relief.”
Burroughs’ unwaveringly level writing style seems appropriate to the content. As biographer Graham Caveney writes in “Gentleman Junkie,” “His prose does not simply describe the heroin lifestyle, it mimics it.”
Perhaps Burroughs, himself, put it best at the conclusion of his prologue: “Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life.”