> Skip to content
  • Published: 2 August 2012
  • ISBN: 9780141903286
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 192

The Yage Letters

Redux



William Burroughs closed his classic debut novel, Junky, by saying he had determined to search out a drug he called 'Yage' which he believed transmitted telepathic powers, a drug that could be 'the final fix'. In The Yage Letters - a mix of travel writing, satire, psychedelia and epistolary novel - he journeys through South America, writing to his friend Allen Ginsberg about his experiments with the strange drug, using it to travel through time and space, to derange his senses - the perfect drug for the author of the wild decentred books that followed. Years later, Ginsberg writes back as he follows in Burroughs' footsteps, and the drug worse and more profound than he had imagined.

  • Published: 2 August 2012
  • ISBN: 9780141903286
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 192

About the authors

Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1926, the son of Naomi Ginsberg and the well-known lyric poet/teacher Louis Ginsberg. As a Columbia College student in the 1940s he began close friendships with William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso and Jack Kerouac. He became associated with the Beat movement and the 1950s San Francisco Renaissance poets Gary Snyder and Michael McClure. After jobs as a labourer, market researcher and sailor, Ginsberg published his first volume, Howl and Other Poems, in 1956. Howl overcame censorship trials to become one of the most widely read poems of the century, translated into twenty-eight languages. In 1965 Ginsberg was, in a matter of weeks, crowned Prague May King, expelled by the Czech police and placed on the FBI's Dangerous Security list. Though he travelled widely, teaching in India, China, and Western and Eastern Europe, his home for most of his life was New York's Lower East Side.

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Allen Ginsberg was awarded the medal of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Minister of Culture in 1993, honoured as Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Poet 1994 and co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, the first accredited Buddhist college in the western world.

Ginsberg died in New York on 5 April 1997, eight days after being diagnosed seriously ill. He continued to write until the last few days of his life and died surrounded by his friends and family. One of the last of the 'Beats', he embodied the surprising, experimental and sometimes lunatic spirit of the artistic and literary scene he was so much a part of. On his death James Campbell wrote of him in the Guardian, 'Allen Ginsberg was the exemplary avant-garde figure of the post-war world. In verse, in politics, in his own intimate life - there was no room for a 'private life' - Ginsberg resisted and disdained the orthodox, the social lie. Few people have done as much to make non-conformism respectable in our time as he did.'

Alan Ginsberg's other books include the annotated Howl, White Shroud: Poems 1980-1985, Cosmopolitan Greetings, Journals Mid-Fifties: 1954-1958 and Selected Poems 1947-1995. Rhino Records issued his four-CD box Holy Soul Jelly Roll: Poems & Songs 1949-1993.

William S Burroughs

William S. Burroughs was born in 1914. His first published novel was the largely autobiographical Junky, which remains a classic depiction of the constant cycle of drug dependency, cures and relapses he was victim to for most of his life. In 1951, in a drunken William Tell stunt, he accidentally shot and killed his common-law wife. He is most famous for his use of the 'cut-up' technique of writing and the novel Naked Lunch. His other major works included Queer, Exterminator! The 'Nova Trilogy' (The Soft Machine, Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded) and the 'Red Night Trilogy' (Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands). He died in 1997.

penguin pop image
penguin pop image