One literary outlaw opined on another in Terry Southern’s 1964 piece about William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. An excerpt:
“The element of humor in Naked Lunch is one of the book’s great moral strengths, whereby the existentialist sense of the absurd is taken towards an informal conclusion. It is an absolutely devastating ridicule of all that is false, primitive, and vicious in current American life: the abuses of power, hero worship, aimless violence, materialistic obsession, intolerance, and every form of hypocrisy. No one, for example, has written with such eloquent disgust about capital punishment; throughout Naked Lunch recur sequences to portray the unfathomable barbarity of a “civilization” which can countenance this ritual. There is only one way, of course, to ridicule capital punishment—and that is by exaggerating its circumstances, increasing its horror, accentuating the animal irresponsibility of those involved, insisting that the monstrous deed be witnessed (and in Technicolor, so to speak) by all concerned. Burroughs is perhaps the first modern writer to seriously attempt this; he is certainly the first to have done so with such startling effectiveness. Social analogy and parallels of this sort abound in Naked Lunch, but one must never mistake this author’s work for political comment, which, as in all genuine art, is more instinctive than deliberate—for Burroughs is first and foremost a poet. His attunement to contemporary language is probably unequaled in American writing. Anyone with a feeling for English phrase at its most balanced, concise, and arresting cannot fail to see this excellence.”
Another Terry Southern post: