The anxiety and prurience of which censorship is the overt political phenomenon has so far prevented any serious scientific investigation of sexual phenomena. Fewer people would be stimulated by the sight of a four-letter word on the printed page. If censorship were removed, perhaps books would be judged more on literary merit, and a dull, poorly written book on a sexual subject would find few readers. At a 1962 symposium in Edinburgh, Burroughs argued that “Censorship is the presumed right of governmental agencies to decide what words and images the citizen is permitted to see. Following this decision, the Massachusetts Supreme Court cleared Naked Lunch of obscenity charges (see Attorney General vs. Since its original publication in Paris in 1959, Naked Lunch has become one of the most important novels of the twentieth century.

Massachussets in March 1966, which confirmed that a “book cannot be held to be obscene in view of substantial evidence showing that it has literary, historical, and social importance” ( 383 U.S. The case was handled by the Massachusetts Supreme Court, but the hearing was delayed until after the decision of the U.S. The book was brought to trial on obscenity charges after a Boston bookseller was arrested for selling copies of it. edition of Naked Lunch was published by Grove Press in 1962. Customs seized several copies of the book that Girodias had tried to distribute in the United States, since the work was considered contraband material. In Paris, Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press brought out the first complete edition of the novel in July 1959. The first excerpts of the novel were issued in a student magazine at the University of Chicago in 1958. In the course of his journey, he explores his drug addiction, homosexuality, and various sexual deviances in lurid violent vignettes.

In The Naked Lunch by William Seward Burroughs (1914-97), the narrator William Lee crosses the United States into Mexico, where he regularly meets his drug dealers, and then travels to Tangier.

Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs