Title says it all. If this question is out of place then please direct me to the appropriate sub if you know of one. Thanks.
Looks like NAKED LUNCH is finished. As to whether it will ever be published in complete form, I have no idea at this point. Complications and the manuscript scattered all over U.S. and Europe.
Burroughs had pitched Naked Lunch to the editors of Olympia Press as early as 1957. Olympia Press, founded by Maurice Girodias in 1953 as a new brand of Obelisk Press, specialized in English-language authors whose literary works were too explicit for American censorship standards at the time, notably stuff like Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1961) and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955). However, Olympia press turned Burroughs down.
Naked Lunch was then set to appear as a series of excerpts in the Chicago Review beginning in Spring 1958; however the Autumn 1958 section was lurid enough to provoke a response by Jack Mabley of the Chicago Daily News, as well as other outlets, and the Chicago Review dropped Burroughs' project and the editors resigned. Allen Ginsberg and others did benefit readings to shore up interest in the project:
There seems to be possibility of publishing expurgated version of Naked Lunch in U.S. Various publishers have shown interest after the phenomenal publicity accorded Allen and Gregory on their late reading tour to Chicago.
The media attention was compounded when the U. S. Post Office impounded copies of Big Table No. 1 (1959), which included "Ten Episodes from Naked Lunch" - Burroughs' struggles with censorship in the United States began to attract more media attention, as folks wondered about the forbidden book. Girodias at Olympia Press took renewed interest in the book, and he offered Burroughs a contract with an $800 advance, which Burroughs accepted. Naked Lunch's first edition was published in English out of the Paris press in late July 1959, and quickly went through its 5,000 copy print run, so that a second 5,000 copy run was published.
By August, Grove Press had bought the American rights to Naked Lunch for $3,000. Grove had been launched in 1947, and was bought out by Barney Rosset in 1951, who turned it into an alternative press publishing material that danced around American obscenity laws. Rosset partnered with Richard Seaver to bring French material to the United States, and Grove began a symbiotic relationship with Olympia Press, bringing over some of the titles for American publication.
There were some legal shenanigans along the way - Giordias and Burroughs were both trying to avoid the US income tax via a Swiss subsidiary - and also interest in foreign translations, but let's focus on the American end of things. Grove Press had some success challenging obscenity rulings for its unexpurgated publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1959); their edition of Naked Lunch was slightly longer than the Olympia Press edition of the text, since it was working from an earlier manuscript, and included a "Deposition" from Burroughs:
Certain passages in the book that have been called pornographic were written as a tract against Capital Punishment in the manner of Jonathan Swift's Modest_Proposal. These sections are intended to reveal capital punishment as the obscene, barbaric and disgusting anachronism that it is. As always the lunch is naked. If civilized countries want to return to Druid Hanging Rites in the Sacred Grove or to drink blood with the Aztecs and feed their Gods with blood of human sacrifice, let them see what is on the end of that long newspaper spoon.
Some, like Ginsberg, criticized Burroughs for this apparent attempt to fawn off responsibility (and possibly legal consequences) for an obscene work, but Burroughs maintained it was more a defense of the literary validity of the work (I'm paraphrasing mightily here). THe Grove Press edition of Naked Lunch was subsequently banned in Boston in 1962, but was reversed in 1966 by a decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Court.
The book was adjudged obscene in the Superior Court. G. L. c. 272, Sections 28C, 28E, 28F (each inserted by St. 1945, c. 278, Section 1). The Supreme Court of the United States has held that, to justify a holding of obscenity, "three elements must coalesce: it must be established that (a) the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to a prurient interest in sex; (b) the material is patently offensive because it affronts contemporary community standards . . . and (c) the material is utterly without redeeming social value" (emphasis supplied). A Book Named "John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure" v. Attorney Gen. of Mass. 383 U.S. 413, 418-421 (hereafter referred to as the Memoirs case). "Naked Lunch" may appeal to the prurient interest of deviants and those curious about deviants. To us, it is grossly offensive and is what the author himself says, "brutal, obscene and disgusting."
As to whether the book has any redeeming social value, the record contains many reviews and articles in literary and other publications discussing seriously this controversial book portraying the hallucinations of a drug addict. Thus it appears that a substantial and intelligent group in the community believes the book to be of some literary significance. Although we are not bound by the opinions of others concerning the book, we cannot ignore the serious acceptance of it by so many persons in the literary community. Hence, we cannot say that "Naked Lunch" has no "redeeming social importance in the hands of those who publish or distribute it on the basis of that value." See the Memoirs case at p. 421.
The record does not show that the book has been "commercially exploited for the sake of prurient appeal, to the exclusion of all other values." The question, therefore, is not presented whether the book, or its publication and distribution, are on that account "utterly without redeeming social importance." See the Memoirs case at pp. 420-421, which appears to treat the privilege under the First Amendment of publishing material like this as a qualified privilege which may be lost if abused.
To sum things up: Burroughs initially struggled to find a publisher, in the US or elsewhere, but the post-war period was seeing a shift in American values and a fight against the current obscenity laws, with some wins for the free speech crowd and media attention which increased its visibility and got it published in Europe, which in turn got it published in the US and elsewhere - although not without legal shenanigans.