The name Herbert Huncke may not spring to mind as readily as the names of the people he influenced, but time may ultimately even that out. Huncke was, after all, the proto-Beat poet, a human drug vacuum who placed his stamp on the works of Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs, among others. Each of those men has fictionalized Huncke in their work, and The Grateful Dead paid his rent in the last years of his life. Legend has it that he first turned Burroughs on to opiates. Scoundrel, hedonist, thief, reporter, poet and artist, Huncke fully embodied the idyllic Bohemian lifestyle. The Herbert Huncke Reader is a collection of his work spanning from the '40s through his death in 1996. Huncke didn't seem to have his eye on publishing when he wrote his material; the introduction notes that he wrote most of his stuff in notebooks, many of which were left behind, lost, or discarded during the course of his life. The material that did find publication is stunning: Huncke's work was largely autobiographical, but his life was one of the more colorful sources from which anyone could hope to draw. Character sketches of New York's artistic '40s underbelly, portrayals of encounters with people he met wandering the docks of Chicago in his teens, drug use, his life of petty crime… Everything here is fascinating. Huncke's prose is simple and matter-of-fact, seeming to stream straight from his mind to the page, and most of his essays are three or four pages in length, making it an easy book to pick up and put down when you have a few minutes to steal. But it's just as easy to pick it up and spend hours immersing yourself in Huncke's world of junkies, crooks, hookers and hermaphrodites. At a time when writers are pumping out autobiographical material without having had a life from which to draw, sitting down with The Herbert Huncke Reader is a liberating experience.