New York library buys personal archives of Naked Lunch author

Precis from The Guardian
Dan Glaister in Los Angeles
Thursday March 2, 2006

William Burroughs once wrote that "nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it."

That hope has perhaps been realised following the announcement yesterday that the Beat writer's extensive personal archive, including unpublished completed works, has been bought by the New York Public Library.
The archive includes draft versions of Burroughs' best-known work, Naked Lunch, and other documents, ranging from the early 1950s, when he published his first novel, Junkie, to the early 1970s, when he was engaged in his more experimental and avant-garde work.
The Library’s curator, Mr Isaac Gewirtz, noted that Burroughs appeared to have helped to facilitate what the writer termed "creative observation".
"The archive is particularly interesting because Burroughs clearly intended it to be read and absorbed as a work of art," he told the New York Times. Burroughs himself published a descriptive catalogue of the archive in 1973. Many of the folios bear handwritten notes from Burroughs explaining their contents, while he added other materials, including newspaper cuttings and photographs, to others, said Mr Gewirtz.
The archive includes correspondence with and reflections on his relationships with other leading figures of the Beat generation: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Paul Bowles, Terry Southern and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
It also includes Burroughs' meditations on the place of the writer. "As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous," he wrote in an unpublished essay included in the archive. "They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow ponge silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hasiesh and languidly caressing a pet gazelle."