Allen Ginsberg- William Burroughs in 1953. (Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery)

 

“When I had heard about ‘Will Hubbard’ I had pictured a stocky dark-haired person of peculiar intensity because of the reports about him, the peculiar directness of his actions, but here had come walking into my pad tall and bespectacled and thin in a seersucker suit as tho he’s just returned from a compound in Equatorial Africa where he’d sat at dusk with a martini discussing the peculiarities… Tall, 6 foot 1, strange, inscrutable because ordinary-looking (scrutable), like a shy bank clerk with a patrician thin-lipped cold bluelipped face, blue eyes saying nothing behind steel rims and glass, sandy hair, a little wispy, a little of the wistful German Nazi youth as his soft hair fluffles in the breeze….”

Jack Kerouac on Burroughs in Vanity of Duluoz