It was at this time that I discovered William Burroughs’s Junkie (original subtitle: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict). I knew literature didn’t always have to focus on rich people, or even the middle classes — I’d encountered the noble poor in Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, and I’d read about the not-so-noble poor in George Orwell and H.G. Wells — but until then I’d never read literature that involved the kind of people Burroughs writes about. I loved horror stories but had read only the kind that elevate ordinary nastiness, making it lofty and supernatural. Junkie does just the opposite, grinding your face in the dirt.
During my first sabbatical year, I started a reading group in a men’s prison outside Baltimore and chose Junkie as one of our books because I thought the inmates would be interested in the unflinching description of the addict’s underworld. Many of these men had been addicts or dealers, and I was curious whether they would recognize themselves in Burroughs’s world.