Alexander Trocchi

Alexander Trocchi was born in Glasgow on 30 July, 1925. At various points in his life he was a straight-A student, a pig farmer, a family man, a pimp, a heroin addict, a pornographer, a dealer in antique books, a forger, a polemicist, a revolutionary, a literary editor, a ‘cosmonaut of inner space’, and not least a novelist and writer. The best of his novels include Helen and Desire, Young Adam, and the semi-autobiographical junk classic, Cain’s Book. He died in 1984 at the age of 59.