SOURCE: Goodman, Michael B. “The Customs' Censorship of William Burroughs' Naked Lunch.” Critique 22, no. 1 (1980): 92-104.

In the following essay, Goodman discusses the process by which Burroughs's novel was seized by the U.S. Customs Service in 1959 and subsequently banned as an obscene work.

With its descriptions of violent eroticism, William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1959) hit a sensitive cultural nerve more forcefully than other books which discussed sex explicitly. It dealt vividly with the interrelationship of sex and violence, with sex and cannibalism, with bestiality, and with homosexual exploitation. Through his caricatures of sexual motivation, Burroughs made associations which were intolerable for a society which perceived sex as related to affection. Like Ulysses and Tropic of Cancer, Naked Lunch was first published in Paris because of the American censorship of sexual discussion. Copies of the 1959 Olympia Press edition mailed to Grove Press in New York were confiscated by the...