With Gentleman Junkie, Graham Caveney gives us the definitive life of William S. Burroughs - less a biography than a "chronology of the Burroughs phenomenon," an examination of the myth behind the man. Filled with 150 color photos - many of them never seen before - and new biographical material, Gentleman Junkie shows how Burroughs's fascinating life, from Harvard to Greenwich Village to Tangiers, was matched only by his enormous impact on modern...

Concisely told and full of fascinating detail, The Birth of the Beat Generation chronicles the life and times of the maverick poets and novelists William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac, as well as the San Francisco group, which included Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gary Snyder. It also evokes the figures surrounding them, including Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Herbert Huncke, and Peter Orlovsky. This is the first book to link the Beats to...