Alexander Trocchi

[2] After working as a seaman on the Murmansk convoys, he studied English Literature and Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, and was awarded second-class honours in 1950.

In the early 1950s he lived in Paris and edited the literary magazine Merlin, which published Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Christopher Logue, and Pablo Neruda, amongst others.

Trocchi claimed that this journal came to an end when the US State Department cancelled its many subscriptions in protest over an article by Jean-Paul Sartre praising the homoeroticism of Jean Genet.

Maurice Girodias published most of Trocchi's novels through Olympia Press,[4] often written under pen names, such as Frances Lengel and Carmencita de las Lunas.

Trocchi and his friends also published Samuel Beckett's War and Memory and Jean Genet's Thief's journal in English for the first time.

He left Paris for the United States and spent time in Taos, New Mexico, before settling in New York City, where he worked on a stone scow on the Hudson River.

A jail term seemed certain, but with the help of friends (including Norman Mailer), Trocchi was smuggled over the Canada–US border where he was given refuge in Montreal by poet Irving Layton and met up with Leonard Cohen.

It proposed an international "spontaneous university" as a cultural force and marked the beginning of his movement towards his sigma project, which played a formative part in the UK Underground.

In March 1966 the Internationale Situationniste, issue number 10, announced "Upon the appearance in London of the first publications of the 'Project Sigma' initiated by Alexander Trocchi, it was mutually agreed that the SI could not involve itself in such a loose cultural venture...

His early novel Young Adam was adapted into a film starring Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton in 2003 after several years of wrangling over finance.