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First published in the United States by Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic 2008
First published in Great Britain in Penguin Classics 2008
First published in this format in Penguin Classics 2009
Copyright © the Estate of Jack Kerouac and the William S. Burroughs Trust
Afterword copyright © James Grauerholz, 2008
All rights reserved
The moral right of the authors has been asserted
ISBN: 978-01-4188-954-2
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
Afterword by James W. Grauerholz
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PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
William S. Burroughs was born in 1914. His first published novel was the largely autobiographical Junky, which remains a classic depiction of the constant cycle of drug dependency, cures and relapses he was victim to for most of his life. In 1951, in a drunken William Tell stunt, he accidentally shot and killed his common-law wife. He is most famous for his use of the ‘cut-up’ technique of writing and the novel Naked Lunch. His other major works include Queer, Exterminator!, the ‘Nova Trilogy’ (The Soft Machine, Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded) and the ‘Red Night Trilogy’ (Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands). He died in 1997.
Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922. In 1947, enthused by bebop, the rebel attitude of his friend Neal Cassady, and the throngs of hobos, drug addicts and hustlers he encountered in New York, he decided to discover America and hitchhike across the country. His writing was openly autobiographical and he developed a style he referred to as ‘spontaneous prose’ which he used to record the experiences of the Beat Generation. Among his many novels are On the Road, Maggie Cassidy, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums and Big Sur. He died in 1969.