Last Words

The journal of the last months of William Burroughs’ life.20 November 1996: ‘Well, it’s time for my Ovaltine and a long good night.’Burroughs died in 1997, after a lifetime of notoriety. The granddaddy of the Beats, druggy, dangerous and bleak, author of thirteen controversial, shocking novels.In his final years, he was writing only in his journals. The last nine months of his diaries are here in ‘Last Words’, and they form a complex, rarely seen, personal portrait of Burroughs at the end of his life, coming to terms with ageing and death. Although well into his eighties, the man we see is nevertheless the same old Burroughs, still riling against the Establishment, still …