William Burroughs' Naked Lunch (First Edition). Naked Lunch is considered Burroughs' seminal work, and one of the landmark publications in the history ofAmerican literature. Extremely controversial in both its subject matter and its use of often obscene language, something Burroughs recognized and intended, the book was banned in many regions of the United States, and was one of the last American books to actually be put on trial for obscenity. The book was banned by Boston courts in 1962 due to obscenity (notably child murder in pedophilic acts), but that decision was reversed in a landmark 1966 opinion by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Naked Mr. America burning frantic with self-bone love screams out: "My asshole confounds the Louvre!... My cock spurt soft diamonds in the morning sunlight!" He plummets from the eyeless lighthouse, kissing and jacking off in the face of the black mirror, glides oblique down with cryptic condoms and mosaic of a thousand newspapers through a drowned city of red brick to settle in black mud with tin cans and beer bottles, gangsters in concrete, pistols pounded flat and meaningless to avoid short-term inspection of prurient ballistic experts. He waits the slow striptease of erosion with fossil loins.-- W.B.