The Romanticized Squalor of 'Queer'

The Beat writer William S. Burroughs began his second book, Queer, just months after killing his wife, Joan Vollmer, at a party above the Bounty Bar in Mexico City. Though he completed the novella in 1953, Queer was not released to the public until 1985, after Burroughs’s new agent, Andrew Wylie, had secured a $200,000 deal with Viking-Penguin for the rights to his back catalog, which kept him afloat until his death, at 83, in 1997.