Naked Lunch on Trial

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

After Naked Lunch was published in the United States by Grove Press in 1962, the state of Massachusetts prosecuted the book for obscenity, and a Boston trial court initially found it obscene. Burroughs's publisher appealed, and on July 7, 1966, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court reversed the ruling, finding the novel had literary merit despite its explicit content. The case is remembered as one of the last major literary obscenity prosecutions in the United States, arriving just before American obscenity law shifted decisively toward protecting serious literary work.