Don’t Hide the Madness: William S. Burroughs in Conversation with Allen Ginsberg

Two seminal figures of the Beat movement, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, discuss literary influences and personal history in a never-before-published three-day conversation following the release of the David Cronenberg film of Burroughs’ classic novel Naked Lunch . The visit coincided with the shamanic exorcism of the demon that Burroughs believed had caused him to fatally shoot his common law wife, Joan Vollmer Burroughs, in 1951 – the event that Burroughs believed had driven his work as a writer. The conversation is interspersed with photographs by Ginsberg revealing Burroughs’s daily activities from his painting studio to the shooting range . Don’t Hide the Madness presents an important, hitherto unpublished primary document of the Beat Generation. —- ISBN: 9781941110706