In addition to contributing significantly to the growing field of Burroughs scholarship, Burroughs Unbound also directly engages with the growing fields of textual studies, archival research, and genetic criticism, asking crucial questions thereby about the nature of archives and their relationship to a writer's work. These questions about the archive concern not only the literary medium. In the 1960s and 1970s Burroughs collaborated with filmmakers, sound technicians, and musicians, who helped re-contextualized his writings in other media. Burroughs Unbound examines these collaborations and explores how such multiple authorship complicates the authority of the archive as a final or complete repository of an author's work. It takes Burroughs seriously as a radical theorist and practitioner who critiqued drug laws, sexual practice, censorship, and what we today call a society of control. More broadly, his work continues to challenge our common assumptions about language, authorship, textual stability, and the archive in its broadest definition. Serious scholarly engagement with William Burroughs' writings couldn't really begin until after his legendary, larger-than-life persona had relinquished the public stage it had dominated for decades. Burroughs Unbound now shows us that genuinely new approaches to those writings couldn't really appear until a generation later, when the last major caches of his manuscripts and notes have finally been unsealed for critical exploration. The essays in this volume, by both well-known and emerging scholars, systematically illuminate those caches, in the process revealing more than anyone could ever have expected about Burroughs' working methods and performance practices, his relationships with other artists, thinkers, and publishers, and the indisputable centrality of his concepts and project to this most disturbing of centuries.