Considering the howls of outrage from many quarters that greeted the publication of Naked Lunch, and the demands that the book (and the author) be suppressed, it might seem bizarre to describe its author as a man who regards his ideas about the failure of contemporary social systems to be the crux of his entire oeuvre, but William S. Burroughs was accurately described by Mary McCarthy as a "Soured Utopian," and in spite of his own condemnatory comments on many aspects of society, he has stated unequivocally that "My purpose in writing has always been to express human potentials and purposes relevant to the Space Age." The exploration of various forms of addiction in Naked Lunch have more to do "with addiction itself," as Burroughs has observed, than the often sensationalistic detail of an obsession with.....
