SOURCE: Girodias, Maurice, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsburg, Carl Solomon, and James Grauerholz. “The Struggle Against Censorship: A Round Table Discussion.” In The Art of Literary Publishing: Editors on Their Craft, edited by Bill Henderson, pp. 212-29. Yonkers, N.Y.: Pushcart Press, 1980.

In the following essay, adapted from a 1974 radio program, Girodias of Olympia Press speaks with William Burroughs, whose controversial novel, Naked Lunch, he published in 1959, and Allen Ginsburg, the author of Howl, which was the subject of a landmark censorship trial in 1957. Also part of the conversation are Carl Solomon, who published Burrough's 1953 book, Junkie as a pulp paperback, and James Grauerholz, Burrough's assistant. The 1962 trial of Naked Lunch was the last major censorship trial of a literary work in the United States. In the 1966 case Memoirs v. Massachusetts, the court “found that Naked Lunch was not without social value, and therefore, not obscene.”

[Girodias]: It was...