The Word Hoard also known as the trunk manuscripts was a large body of text (approximately 1000 typewriter pages) produced by author William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs

William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...

 between roughly 1953 and 1958. It constitutes the main body of Burroughs' most experimental novels.

Material from this hoard can be found in his books Naked Lunch

Naked Lunch

Naked Lunch is a novel by William S. Burroughs originally published in 1959. The book is structured as a series of loosely-connected vignettes. Burroughs stated that the chapters are intended to be read in any order...

, The Soft Machine

The Soft Machine

The Soft Machine is a novel by William S. Burroughs, first published in 1961, two years after his groundbreaking Naked Lunch. It was originally composed using the cut-up and fold-in techniques from manuscripts belonging to The Word Hoard...

, Nova Express

Nova Express

Nova Express is a 1964 novel by William S. Burroughs. It was written using the cut-up method, developed by Burroughs with Brion Gysin, of enfolding snippets of different texts into the novel. It is the third book in The Nova Trilogy, preceded by The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded...

, The Ticket That Exploded

The Ticket That Exploded

The Ticket That Exploded is a novel by William S. Burroughs first published in 1962 by Olympia Press and later published in the United States by Grove Press in 1967. It is the second book in a trilogy created using the cut-up technique, often referred to as The Nova Trilogy...

, Dead Fingers Talk

Dead Fingers Talk

Dead Fingers Talk, first published in 1963, was the fifth novel published by Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs. The book was originally published by Olympia Press....

and Interzone

Interzone (book)

Interzone is a collection of short stories and other early works by William S. Burroughs. The collection was first published by Viking Penguin in 1989, although several of the stories had already been printed elsewhere, including an earlier publication entitled Early Routines...

. Naked Lunch was edited by Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...

 and Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac

Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...

, whereas the other books were mostly edited by Burroughs himself, albeit with some help from Brion Gysin

Brion Gysin

Brion Gysin was a painter, writer, sound poet, and performance artist born in Taplow, Buckinghamshire.He is best known for his discovery of the cut-up technique, used by his friend, the novelist William S. Burroughs...

.

Many of the stories constitute what Burroughs refers to as routine

Routine

Routine may refer to:*Subroutine in computer science*Choreographed routine, orchestrated dance involving several performers*Comedy routine, comedic act or part of an act*Visual routine, visual cognitive means of extracting information from a scene...

s: good stories that stick, probably to be understood akin to the routines performed by varieté

Varieté

Variety is a 1925 silent drama film directed by Ewald Andre Dupont based on the novel Der Eid des Stephan Huller by . Jannings portrays "Boss Huller," an ex-trapeze artist who runs a seedy carnival with his wife and child...

 artists or stand-up comedians. The same routines appear at several points in the different books, rewritten and varied to add new twists, as an artist performing the same number over and over again, improvising some each time. This particular characteristic has often been likened to jazz

Jazz

Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...

 solos.

Another twist given to the Word Hoard was added by using the cut-up and fold-in techniques

Cut-up technique

The cut-up technique is an aleatory literary technique in which a text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. Most commonly, cut-ups are used to offer a non-linear alternative to traditional reading and writing....

 for rearranging and varying the material in different ways. In some books, especially The Soft Machine, Burroughs later revised the cut-up sections and added in more linear prose, since he was displeased with the result.

The Nova Trilogy

The author has declared the three books The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, Nova Express form a trilogy, sometimes dubbed The Nova Trilogy

The Nova Trilogy

The Nova Trilogy, The Nova Epic or The Cut-up Trilogy is a name commonly given by critics to a series of three experimental prose novels by William S. Burroughs...

or The Nova Epic. This grouping is indeed intentional, but comparing the books to the other material produced from the Word Hoard, there is sometimes more in common between Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine than between the three books themselves.

In The Beat Book from 1974, Burroughs claims that when he edits a novel, about half of the material is cut away and later recycled in the next novel. This explains the phenomenon of the plots and characters fading in and out from the different books.

The Nova Trilogy was intended by the author as "a mythology for the space age."