For the musical group by this name, see The Yage Letters (band)

The Yage Letters (band)

The Yage Letters were an English musical group active in the Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria region, from 1991 to 1997. The group consisted of Chris Burke and Steve Crabtree ....

.

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

Beat generation

The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...

 authors William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs

William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...

 and Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...

. It was issued by City Lights Books.

Amazon Rainforest

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

Amazon Rainforest

The Amazon Rainforest , also known in English as Amazonia or the Amazon Jungle, is a moist broadleaf forest that covers most of the Amazon Basin of South America...

 in search of yagé (ayahuasca

Ayahuasca

Ayahuasca is any of various psychoactive infusions or decoctions prepared from the Banisteriopsis spp. vine, usually mixed with the leaves of dimethyltryptamine-containing species of shrubs from the Psychotria genus...

), 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

Naked Lunch is a novel by William S. Burroughs originally published in 1959. The book is structured as a series of loosely-connected vignettes. Burroughs stated that the chapters are intended to be read in any order...

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

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

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 politics in which "a purple-assed baboon

Baboon

Baboons are African and Arabian Old World monkeys belonging to the genus Papio, part of the subfamily Cercopithecinae. There are five species, which are some of the largest non-hominoid members of the primate order; only the mandrill and the drill are larger...

" is appointed to the United States Supreme Court, was omitted from the original edition of the book on the grounds it might be considered obscene; it was subsequently issued as a chapbook 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

Cut-up technique

The cut-up technique is an aleatory literary technique in which a text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. Most commonly, cut-ups are used to offer a non-linear alternative to traditional reading and writing....

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

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 Harris

Oliver Harris is a British academic and lecturer at Keele University. He has written on and edited numerous works by William S. Burroughs, including Junky and The Yage Letters. His subject areas are film, literature and American studies....

(who has previously edited other collections of correspondence by Burroughs). The book has been expanded with an extensive essay on its history (written by Harris), along with previously unpublished material by Burroughs and Ginsberg.