The late William Burroughs, author of “Naked Lunch,” was compared by some critics to Poe, Baudelaire and Blake. This is remarkable praise for a guy who wrote only one significant book and needed Allen Ginsberg to figure out where all the pages went. Ginsberg also gave him the title, by misreading Burroughs’ illegible handwritten reference to “naked lust.” And since I always thought the title was the best part of “Naked Lunch,” you can understand why I’ve always thought Burroughs more than a little overrated.FN:1
Burroughs was no great admirer of the police. He and Jack Kerouac were once arrested as possible accessories to a murder,FN:2 causing Burroughs to hold forth at some length about fascist law enforcement. And he went to his grave complaining about an incident in South America in which he went to a police station to report his camera had been stolen and was arrested for immigration violations.
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