Distinctly less literary are the letters to his parents, Mortimer and Laura Lee Burroughs, then of Palm Beach, mostly assuring them of his solvency and repute (he was around 50 years old at the time). The letters to his son, Billy Burroughs Jr. (who wrote the chip-off-the-old-block “Speed,”but sadly declined and predeceased his father), are moving in their sincere but awkward attempts at filling a paternal role for which he was ill suited. Burroughs, of course, was no saint. More shocking than his occasional flare-ups of misogyny or his consistent generalized misanthropy are the poisoned arrows he directed at his peers: “On the credit side of ledger Frank O’Hara was hit and killed by car and Delmore Schwartz . . . died of heart attack.” A 1970 letter to Truman Capote, prompted by his distaste for “In Cold Blood” and for the fact that Capote did nothing to save his subjects from capital punishment, reads very much like a hex:

“You have betrayed and sold out the talent that was granted you by this department. That talent is now officially withdrawn. Enjoy your dirty money. You will never have anything else. You will never write another sentence above the level of ‘In Cold Blood.’ As a writer you are finished. Over and out.”

Capote never did, as it happens, complete another book-length work.

The collection, which includes letters to sundry readers, curiosity seekers, figures from the underground press, drug-rehab professionals interested in apomorphine and a woman he had never met who had proposed marriage (he is stern but not unkind), was made possible by the fact that Burroughs meticulously preserved carbon copies of virtually everything he sent out. Bill Morgan has skillfully assembled these from libraries around the country. It is hard to say how much else might have gone into the editing process. Certainly it would be difficult to enjoy reading the book without being very familiar with Burroughs’s life and work, since the annotations are skeletal, mostly limited to birth and death dates of cited names and perhaps a factoid or two. Many, many allusions to events remain unexplained; whole paragraphs are left obscure, perhaps needlessly. Sometimes an alert reader can supply information that Morgan does not. In a pair of letters regarding David Cooper on the subject of apomorphine, for example, there is no identification of Cooper (1931-86), who was R. D. Laing’s collaborator in the 1960s anti-psychiatry movement known as the Philadelphia Association. Perhaps someday a scholarly edition of these letters will be issued that in addition to rectifying such omissions will include cross-references to the novels.

These letters differ from the average writer’s correspondence in how deeply they are entwined with the author’s fictional universe. There is some material-world grousing, to be sure, but very little gossip and hardly any discussion of news events or other people’s books. Instead, the sky is filled with clouds that drift between books already written and books not yet conceived, as in this 1964 passage, which takes in both “Naked Lunch” and “The Dead Star” (1969): “An old junky selling Christmas seals on North Clark Street. . . . The ‘Priest’ they called him. . . . And just here is a picture from Newsweek, May 15, 1964 . . . plane wreck. . . . The ‘Priest’ there hand lifted last rites for 44 airliner dead including Captain Clark (left). Left on North Clark Street.” And for anyone who has heard Burroughs’s voice, that distinctive Midwestern croak, part W. C. Fields and part small-town undertaker, it is a collection that comes with its own internal soundtrack.