''The Yage Letters'', first published in 1963, is a collection of correspondence and other writings by

Beat Generation The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-war era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Genera ...

authors William S. Burroughs and

Allen Ginsberg Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Gener ...

. It was issued by

City Lights Books City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination in San Francisco, California, that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It also houses the nonprofit City Lights Foundation, which publishes selected ti ...

Amazon rainforest

Most of the letters date back to 1953 and chronicle Burroughs' visit to the

Amazon rainforest The Amazon rainforest, Amazon jungle or ; es, Selva amazónica, , or usually ; french: Forêt amazonienne; nl, Amazoneregenwoud. In English, the names are sometimes capitalized further, as Amazon Rainforest, Amazon Forest, or Amazon Jungle. ...

in search of yagé (

ayahuasca AyahuascaPronounced as in the UK and in the US. Also occasionally known in English as ''ayaguasca'' ( Spanish-derived), ''aioasca'' (Brazilian Portuguese-derived), or as ''yagé'', pronounced or . Etymologically, all forms but ''yagé'' desce ...

), a plant with near-mythical hallucinogenic and some say telepathic qualities. Along the way, Burroughs and Ginsberg share other stories and anecdotes, including some concepts Burroughs would later use in novels such as ''

Naked Lunch ''Naked Lunch'' (sometimes ''The Naked Lunch'') is a 1959 novel by American writer William S. Burroughs. The book is structured as a series of loosely connected vignettes, intended by Burroughs to be read in any order. The reader follows the na ...

''. The book ends with further correspondence written in 1960 detailing Ginsberg's experiments with yagé.

Two Burroughs pieces

Beyond the letters themselves, the book is noteworthy for two short pieces by Burroughs. The anarchic "Roosevelt After Inauguration", a savage parody of American politics in which "a purple-assed baboon" is appointed to the

United States Supreme Court The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that involve a point o ...

, was omitted from the original edition of the book on the grounds it might be considered obscene; it was subsequently issued as a

chapbook A chapbook is a small publication of up to about 40 pages, sometimes bound with a saddle stitch. In early modern Europe a chapbook was a type of printed street literature. Produced cheaply, chapbooks were commonly small, paper-covered bookle ...

later in the 1960s and was later published in the small volume '' Roosevelt After Inauguration and Other Atrocities'' with two political essays. The story was restored to ''The Yage Letters'' in a later reprinting by City Lights. The second notable piece serves as the epilogue to the book. "I Am Dying, Meester?" is considered a poem by some and is an early demonstration of the "

cut-up technique The cut-up technique (or ''découpé'' in French) is an aleatory literary technique in which a written text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. The concept can be traced to the Dadaists of the 1920s, but it was developed and populariz ...

" espoused by Burroughs in the 1960s, shuffling together fragments of sentences and thoughts from other texts to create a surreal new narrative.

Status as a novel

Some sources, including City Lights Books itself, consider ''The Yage Letters'' to be a novel. According to the back cover of a 1990s edition of the book, Burroughs and Ginsberg began compiling the work in late 1953, not long after the original set of letters was written, but it was not published for nearly a decade.

The Yage Letters Redux

In April 2006, City Lights Books published ''Yage Letters Redux'', a new edition of the book edited by

Oliver Harris Oliver C. G. Harris is a British academic and Professor of American Literature at Keele University. He is the author and editor of fourteen books, including a dozen editions of works by William S. Burroughs: ''Letters, 1945–1959'' (1993), ''J ...

. The book has been expanded with an extensive essay on its history (written by Harris), along with previously unpublished material by Burroughs and Ginsberg. Harris established that the 1953 letters were in fact largely fabricated from notes and a prose narrative which Burroughs first wrote. {{DEFAULTSORT:Yage Letters, The 1963 non-fiction books Books by William S. Burroughs Works about ayahuasca Works by Allen Ginsberg Psychedelic literature Collections of letters City Lights Publishers books