According to James Grauerholz, numerous attempts were made by Kerouac and others to get the book published, until Burroughs brought a lawsuit over the use of quotations from the manuscript that appeared in "New York" magazine in 1976; the suit, which was settled in the 1980s, established the ownership of the work. When Burroughs died in 1997, Grauerholz became the executor of his estate, with responsibility for the disposition of his unpublished works. He had befriended Lucien Carr and agreed not to publish the manuscript in Carr's lifetime, although an excerpt from the book was included in the 1997 Burroughs omnibus "Word Virus", published by Grove after the writer's death (but approved by Burroughs before he died). Carr's death in 2005 made way for the complete book to be published at last.