The Book of Cain (first published in 1960): After Naked Lunch, Burroughs is probably the most famous, scandalous and gripping autobiographical work about drug addiction, telling about all the nuances of the life of a heroin addict. Trocchi himself spoke of a “immersion into the inner cosmos,” for which he turned his illness—“drug use”—into a subject of serious and honest philosophical study. The Book of Cain, a detailed account of a junk writer's odyssey in New York, is even more than a novel - a manifesto of a way of life, a reportage of a "journey in hell", an experimental diary of a drug addict, combining autobiography and philosophical prose, a study of the deformation of consciousness under the influence of drugs, and crude shockingness that destroys all moral conventions, a caustic cultural commentary on literary processes and a nihilistic protest against the “ethics of consumer society.” This sixties bestseller is now critically acclaimed as a classic of modern literature and has been translated into many languages.