This Scottish author's works were banned in Australia.
Alexander Trocchi was better known as an eccentric than as an author. He attended the University of Glasgow from 1942 to 1943 and from 1946 to1950, and served in the Royal Navy from 1943 to 1946. Trocchi began writing poetry and prose in the late 1940s, and by the early 1950s was an established member of the artistic avant-garde. With Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse he edited Merlin, a literary magazine that published Ionesco, Genet, Beckett, Creeley, Sartre, and Miller, for seven issues from 1952-1955. He was also an editor of Paris Quarterly from 1952 to 1955 and of Moving Times, which published work by William S. Burroughs, Trocchi, and Jeff Nittall.
Trocchi's association with Merlin led to his collaboration with Maurice Girodias at Olympia Press. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Trocchi helped Girodias publish books, wrote catalog copy, and contributed a large number of pornographic writings, including Helen and Desire, The Carnal Days of Helen Seferis, White Thighs, Vol. 5 of My Life and Loves by Frank Harris, and School for Sin. Most of his work was banned in England, France, and America and also in Australia. At the same time he worked with these publishing efforts, Trocchi was involved with other projects, including painting, sculpting, joining Asgar Jorn in the International Situationist movement, and pursuing his own writing.
His first novel, Young Adam (1954), a tale of immorality and justice, was followed by his more famous Cain's Book, a roman a clef which detailed his adventures as a heroin addict living on a scow on the Hudson River. The book's frank depiction of drug addiction and sex was the source of an obscenity trial in 1963 and the book was banned in England. His other literary works included The Outsiders (1961), a collection of stories and a revision of Young Adam, and Man at Leisure (1972) a collection of poems.
(Source: Washington Library in St Louis website quoting Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 15 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1978))
