Herbert Huncke's 'Coupable de tout' Published in French

The French edition of Herbert Huncke's 'Coupable de tout' (Guilty of Everything) has been released by Éditions du Seuil, with prefaces by William S. Burroughs and Bernard Comment. Huncke, a key figure of the Beat Generation who died in 1996 at age 81, left behind a body of work including an autobiography, short stories, poetry, and video recordings. He is credited with introducing the term 'beat' to Jack Kerouac, derived from street slang meaning exhaustion and wandering. Growing up in Detroit and Chicago in a comfortable middle-class family, Huncke later traveled across the US by freight train and hitchhiking before settling in New York's 42nd Street, where he engaged in sex work, drug dealing, and theft. He served as a model for characters in works by Burroughs (Junky), Kerouac (On the Road, The Town and the City), and Ginsberg. Despite his transient lifestyle, Huncke wrote constantly in notebooks, publishing a journal in 1965, short stories in 1980, and interviews in 1990. His writing is characterized by a lucid, unflinching depiction of addiction and marginality. Burroughs described him as 'a kind of Virgilian guide to the depths' and 'the first specialist in getting high.'