Last Words: The Final Journals (Posthumous) Signed Reference

Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs was published posthumously by Grove Press in 2000, three years after Burroughs’s death in August 1997. The book collects journal entries from the last months of Burroughs’s life in Lawrence, Kansas — reflections on death, cats, dreams, and the daily routines of an elderly man living alone in a small Midwestern town.

The Book

The journals reveal a Burroughs stripped of his public persona — not the outlaw, the drug fiend, or the avant-garde provocateur, but a gentle, lonely old man who feeds his cats, tends his garden, and contemplates his approaching death with a mixture of curiosity and resignation. The entries are brief, often fragmentary, and deeply human.

The most powerful passages concern his dead friends — Ginsberg (who died three months before Burroughs), Brion Gysin, Jack Kerouac, Joan Vollmer — and the solitude of extreme old age. The final entry, written days before his death, has the quality of a farewell, though Burroughs would not have recognized it as such.

Posthumous Publication Status

As a posthumous publication, Last Words was not signed by Burroughs. Copies bearing his signature would need to be manuscript material, correspondence, or items signed before his death but associated with the journals.

First Edition Details

Publisher: Grove Press, New York Publication date: 2000

Market Values

• Unsigned first edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
• Advance reading copies: $40–$100

A quiet, moving book that provides the final word from one of American literature’s most extraordinary figures. Essential for the Burroughs completist and valuable as a biographical document.