William Burroughs Thinking of Shanghai?

Posted: December 13th, 2025 | No Comments »

William S Burroughs, primary figure of the Beat Generation, modernist/post-modernist writer, a massive influence on both underground and popular culture and literature – and a man who like Interzones. Indeed his collection of short stories and other early works from 1953 to 1958 is called Interzone, and is the product largely of the time he spent living in the International Zone of Tangiers. He had already written Junkie, he had already killed his first wife in Mexico City and then drifted through South America. he then headed to Tangier, inspired by Paul Bowles’s writing. He spent four years there working on the fiction that would later become Naked Lunch, as well as attempting to write commercial articles about Tangier.

John Hopkins was a young American also trying to write in Tangier. He met Burroughs, as well as Bowles and other Tangier-ites (Tangerines) in the International Zone in the in the 60s when Burroughs was bouncing between London, New York, Paris and Tangiers. Hopkins was obsessed with Tangiers an d Burroughs as well as Paul and Jane Bowles and others that comprised “literary Tangier”. Hopkins recalls one conversation in his memoir The Tangier Diaries:

‘Burroughs, monkish in his black suit and skull cap, moaned, “If this were the 1930s, I’d be in Shanghai.” Paul Bowles replied: “Tangier is out of the mainstream. It’s a backwater. It has changed less than most places, or is changing more slowly.” Grumbled Burroughs: “Tangier wins by default.”

Make of that what you will!!

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