История запрещенных книг.
American writer William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch would eventually become a counterculture classic, but when it was published at the end of the 1950s, this hallucinatory account of drug addiction provoked outrage in the US.
Written in Tangier, Morocco (the seedy «interzone» in which the book is partly set) in the late 1950s, Naked Lunch was published in Paris in 1959. Apart from being a tale about drug use, it is laced with profanities and includes depictions of gay sex. Copies that reached US shores were labelled as obscene and confiscated by customs agents.
When a US edition was published in 1962, it was banned, leading to courtroom showdowns in Boston and Los Angeles. Even though poet Allen Ginsberg and novelist Norman Mailer testified to the book’s literary merits, the judges were dubious. In Los Angeles, the bench ruled that it was not obscene, though the judge did find it appalling. In Boston, the case went all the way to the Massachusetts Supreme Court, which relied on the decision of a 1966 US Supreme Court to curtail the power of any governing body to ban or regulate artistic content. The Massachusetts Supreme Court dismissed the obscenity charges on Naked Lunch — ending the last literary censorship battle on US soil.
