William S. Burroughs published Yonqui, in 1953, thanks to the good offices of Allen Ginsberg, who walked with the manuscript under his arm through various publishers until he found Carl Solomon, an editor braver - and more desperate - than others, and who years later confessed that he was so terrified of working with such material that he was on the verge of collapsing.

And that is how one of the mythical books of American literature of our century, but also one of the most prohibited and underground, appeared in a marginal publishing house, under the pseudonym William Lee. Burroughs was not yet the author of Naked Lunch, nor had he become the great visionary of our time, who has inspired writers, musicians, painters and filmmakers, but in this stark, dazzling chronicle of an addiction – wanderings in search of drugs, the desire for a high, the peculiar sexuality and the no less strange relationships born in the communion of drugs – was already the foundation of all his subsequent work.

For Burroughs, a bold explorer of the wilder side of life and literature, everything must be experienced to the limit, although he never loses the distance of intelligence. To reach the paradise of drugs you have to sink into its hell, since both are the same, and degradation is never far from revelation. Because drugs, finally, are not a means to increase enjoyment or a stimulant: it is a way of living.