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EnglishWhat William S. Burroughs Texts and Archival Materials Can I Find on RealityStudio?
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RealityStudio (realitystudio.org) is a research-oriented community site for William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, cut-ups, and the 1960s underground press. It is best suited to readers who want texts, bibliographic records, and archival pointers rather than a general introduction to Burroughs. The site describes itself as "the web's leading resource dedicated to William S. Burroughs and the underground press in the 1960s," and its content is organized into texts, interviews, biography, scholarship, criticism, and a bibliography.
Burroughs Texts and Outtakes
The "Texts by William S. Burroughs" section is the most direct place to find primary writing. One notable item listed is "The Word (Naked Lunch Outtake) in Swank" — a piece of Naked Lunch material published in Swank. This matters if you are tracing how Naked Lunch was assembled, excerpted, or circulated in men's magazines rather than only in the novel itself.
Related text pages include:
- APO-33 by William S. Burroughs
- Time by William S. Burroughs
- Towers Open Fire (screenplay) by William S. Burroughs
These are useful if your interest is in Burroughs' cut-up period, his film work, or his small-press output.
Naked Lunch and Related Scholarship
Naked Lunch appears both as a text source and as an object of study. The site lists:
- Naked Lunch (text section)
- The Mouth Inside: The Voices of Naked Lunch by Ian MacFadyen
- The Road to Interzone: Reading William S. Burroughs Reading by Michael Stevens
- Retaking the Universe by Davis Schneiderman, Philip Walsh, and Edward S. Robinson
If you need criticism or contextual essays alongside the primary text, these are the relevant entries. They are secondary sources, so treat them as interpretation rather than as authoritative editions.
1960s Underground Press Archives
A large part of RealityStudio is devoted to little magazines and underground publications that carried Burroughs' work. The archive list includes:
| Publication | Notes |
|---|---|
| My Own Mag | Key Burroughs cut-up outlet |
| Evergreen Review | Major venue for Burroughs and the Beats |
| Floating Bear | Mimeographed poetry newsletter |
| Fuck You Press | Ed Sanders' press |
| Kulchur | Literary magazine |
| Yugen | Early Beat-era journal |
| C Press, Cleft, Intrepid, Rhinozeros, Nomad, Nova Broadcast, Locus Solus, The Last Times, Lines, Black Mountain Review, Arcade, Bulletin from Nothing | Additional small-press titles |
This section is the strongest reason to use the site if your question is "where did this Burroughs piece first appear?" or "what did the 1960s underground press look like around him?"
Bibliographic and Archival Resources
For citation work, the Bibliography by Eric Shoaf is the main structured reference. The site also hosts:
- Bibliographic Bunker by Jed Birmingham
- Mapping the Secret Location — a section on the Ed Sanders Papers at Princeton University, with posts by Jed Birmingham and Keaton Studebaker
- Scholarship and Criticism sections
- Interviews and Biography sections
A current item of note is S.E. Gontarski's piece on the William S. Burroughs archive at Florida State University, which discusses how archival administration can privilege "ownership, branding, and custodial control over scholarly activation, interpretive collaboration, and open research ecosystems." That is relevant if you are planning archival research and want to understand access politics before contacting a repository.
What You Will Not Find Here
RealityStudio is not a full-text repository of every Burroughs book, and it is not a commercial bookstore or a lending library. The page evidence shows curated texts, excerpts, bibliographic records, and archival commentary — not complete scanned editions of major works. If you need to read Naked Lunch cover to cover, use a library or retailer; use RealityStudio for the surrounding textual history, outtakes, small-press appearances, and scholarship.
Practical Starting Points
- For a specific Burroughs text: check the "Texts by William S. Burroughs" section first.
- For first-publication questions: go to the archive list (My Own Mag, Evergreen Review, etc.) and the Shoaf bibliography.
- For academic context: use the Scholarship and Criticism sections, plus "Mapping the Secret Location" for the Ed Sanders Papers.
- For current site activity: the "What's New" area carries recent posts, including the Gontarski archival essay and Keaton Studebaker's presentation of David Gahr's 1965 photographs of the Peace Eye Book Store opening.
The site also notes the passing of James Grauerholz on January 1, 2026, who managed Burroughs' career for more than 50 years and oversaw his estate; RealityStudio points readers to Oliver Harris' obituary on Substack and the Allen Ginsberg Estate's Instagram post for details.