SOURCE: "The Bare Facts," in Times Literary Supplement, October 15, 1993, p. 22.

[In the following review of the first volume of The Letters of William S. Burroughs, Campbell gleans the "facts" of Burroughs's early writing career from his correspondence, observing its relation to specific works and other Beat writers.]

There is no such thing as a Naked Lunch. In keeping with its conception as a fluid event rather than a frozen artefact ("the usual novel has happened", the author wrote. "This novel is happening"), William Burroughs's purgative, funny, wholly original book has continued to exhibit new forms over the years. As successive editions have followed the Paris one of 1959, passages which once appeared as footnotes have been integrated into the text or else excluded from it; new prefaces and appendices have been grafted on to the narrative, each becoming in the process an organic part. Even the title eludes definition...