The Burroughs-Warhol Connection is the latest book from Victor Bockris, author of With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker, Beat Punks: New York’s Underground Culture from the Beat Generation to the Punk Explosion, and Warhol: The Biography. This new title (forthcoming December 2024) examines the connections between two of the 20th century’s most fascinating artists, men who defied all expectations and reshaped the culture.
Bockris worked closely with both Burroughs and Warhol and in 1980 brought them together on three occasions. The results are contained in this volume of memories, interviews, and 100 photographs.
Earlier this year, we published a short interview with Bockris about his book.
About the Book
The Burroughs-Warhol Connection revolves around four meetings between William S. Burroughs and Andy Warhol in 1980. Its author, Victor Bockris, was a friend and collaborator of both men and attempted to bring them together for a series of interviews. The results were comical, absurd, and brilliant. The two never quite seemed capable of connecting, yet somehow a bond was formed and they came to like and respect one another.
Bockris has collected the interviews he recorded—which are punctuated by visits from Mick Jagger, Lou Reed, David Bowie, Debbie Harry, and other luminaries—mixed them with excerpts from his journals, and gathered one hundred photographs and collages. There are also reflective essays from Bockris and Jed Birmingham. The book is a collage, a cut-up, a constellation. It is a vital and beautiful document of the connection (and missed connections) between two of the most important minds of the last century. It also features a long, brilliant interview with Bockris conducted by Leon Horton (a frequent contributor to Beatdom and editor of the recently published Ten Times a Poet).
About the Author
Victor Bockris was born in England in 1949. In the early seventies, he published leading punk rock voices through his underground poetry press, Telegraph Books. Working with Andrew Wylie under the name Bockris-Wylie, he set out to interview the one hundred most intelligent people in New York, and over the course of three years spoke with the likes of Salvidor Dali, John Lennon, Lou Reed, Mick Jagger, Peter Bogdanovich, Muhammad Ali, William Burroughs and Andy Warhol. In the late seventies, Bockris began working closely with Warhol and Burroughs. Bockris became the bridge between the Beats, Warhol and the Punks.
In a career spanning fifty years, Bockris has covered the heroes of the Beat Generation, the Warhol School, and the Punk Rock Movement in a series of seventeen books, including biographies of Andy Warhol, Keith Richards, Lou Reed, and Patti Smith. He has written portraits of Muhammad Ali, William Burroughs, Blondie, and the Velvet Underground, as well as autobiographies of John Cale and Bebe Buel and a book that wraps them all up together: Beat Punks. Together these books form a mythology for the counterculture.
Sample
Both Burroughs and Warhol were multimedia artists, working in a range of disciplines and styles as a means of pushing artistic boundaries. Bockris’ book similarly breaks with convention. It mixes his journals with interviews; essays are beside excerpts from diaries; photographs mingle with collages… The layout of this book was painstakingly crafted over several years.
Order
The Burroughs-Warhol Connection was published in December 2024. You can order here using the link below or via Amazon. It is also on Gumroad as a digital file and you can order it through most online retailers.
Reviews
By living up close and intimate time after time with Burroughs, Warhol, Jagger, Ginsberg and others, Bockris was on the scene to hear and record quotable quotations that no reporter on a short leash, a tight-deadline and with a limited word-length would likely hear and record. This committed observer put in the time and it paid off.
— Jonah Raskin, author of American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation (writing for Rock and the Beat Generation)
The Burroughs-Warhol Connection is the definitive account. Go out and buy it.
— The Allen Ginsberg Estate
Review copies can be requested via the publisher (see our contact page) or through Edelweiss. If you have read an advanced copy of the book, consider leaving a review on the book’s Goodreads page.
