This image is the cover for the book With William Burroughs

With William Burroughs

A trove of intimate conversations between Burroughs and Susan Sontag, Andy Warhol, Patti Smith, David Bowie, and more icons of ’70s New York and beyond.

During the 1970s, William Burroughs, author of Junky and Naked Lunch, lived in a loft on the Bowery in New York City’s Lower East Side. Christened “The Bunker,” his apartment became a modern-day literary salon with people like Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Susan Sontag, and fellow beat poet Allen Ginsberg passing through for a drink or a joint and the promise of stimulating conversation with the ingenious and eccentric Burroughs.

Among Burroughs’s entourage was author Victor Bockris, whose tape recorder was always running to capture meandering dinner party conversations and electric late-night sessions in the Bunker. In these moments, Bockris captures Burroughs’s desires, anxieties, and thoughts on writing, photography, punk rock, and more. The recordings and recollections in With William Burroughs create an unprecedentedly multidimensional portrait of a man who is often overshadowed by his reputation.

Victor Bockris

Born in England in 1949, Victor Bockris has spent most of his working life in the United States. He has written biographies of artists, writers, and musicians, including Warhol: The Biography, With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker, Uptight: The Velvet Underground Story, Transformer: The Complete Lou Reed Story, and Keith Richards: The Biography. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1971, Bockris cofounded Telegraph Books, an independent publisher of emerging writers, with poets Aram Saroyan and Andrew Wylie. Bockris moved to New York City in 1973, where he went on to work with many icons of the city’s art and literary community during the Beat Punk period of 1977–1983. Dubbed the poet laureate of the New York Underground, Bockris continues to publish books around the world. He is currently writing Scars: My Life in the New York Underground.

Open Road Integrated Media