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Ted Morgan's book "Literary Outlaw" is ostensibly 
a biography of William Burroughs, but Burroughs being 
the elder of the Beat circle, it actually seems 
like a good document of the entire scene. 

He's got a little on Joan Vollmer, evidentally largely 
from Edie Parker interviews:     


   Edie reflected; she spoke, walked, dressed and
   read slowly, as if savoring every moment.  She
   read everything, every newspaper and magazine.
   In _The New Yorker_, she liked the cartoons of
   William Steig, particularly the one of the
   dejected fellow saying, "My mother loved me but
   she died."
      
   Edie thought Joan was the most intelligent girl    
   she had ever met.  She had an independent mind,    
   always questioning what anyone said, including    
   her teachers at Barnard.  In one of her marginal            
   notes in her copy of Marx's _Capital and Other         Or perhaps         
   Writings_, there are echoes of Burroughs'              echoes of            
   thinking: "Maybe Marxism is dynamic and                Vollmer in
   optimistic, and Freudianism is not.  Is one more       Burroughs?
   serviceable than the other? Why does it always                          
   have to be either/or?"                                                  
                                                     
   
                         
   Joan's idea of a good time was to go to Child's
   at 110th Street and Broadway and sip _kummel_
   and have deep conversations about Plato and Kant
   while listening to classical music.  Or she
   would spend the entire morning in the bathtub,
   with bubble-bath up to her chin, reading
   Proust.  If you wanted to talk to her you had to
   do it in the bathroom. 

   ... She also helped him with his term papers,
   writing one for his course on Dryden and the
   eighteenth century in the manner of a Dryden
   poem, which the professor Joseph Wood Krutch,
   liked well enough to give him an "A."  His
   papers were in fact so brilliant that Kingsland
   worried that his teachers would get suspicious.

                           p 93-94

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