In William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination, Harris examines the major works Burroughs produced in the 1950s -- Junky, Queer, The Yage Letters, and Naked Lunch -- to piece together an accurate, material record of his creative history during his germinal decade as a writer. Refuting the "junk paradigm" of addiction that has been used to categorize and characterize much of Burroughs's oeuvre, Harris instead focuses on the significance of Burroughs's letter writing in real life and his remarkable and unsuspected use of the epistolary for his fiction. As Burroughs said to Allen Ginsberg about Naked Lunch, "the real novel is letters to you" Drawing on rare access to manuscripts, the book suggests new ways of comprehending Burroughs's unique politics and aesthetics and offers the first accurate account of the writing of Naked Lunch.

In his quest to reevaluate the cultural and biographical underpinnings of Burroughs's work, Harris mines the popular and critical images of the writer. He demonstrates how Junky has been misread and points out the political and artistic differences that separate it from Queer. He also identifies the crucial place of Queer in Burroughs's development, as it marked the beginning of thewriter's secreted epistolary economy that would culminate in Naked Lunch. Boldly asserting that Naked Lunch should be understood as not "the real novel" in the sense that it became "not-letters" to Ginsberg, Harris allows readers to recognize the emergence of Burroughs's true tex