How Love Can Lead Youngsters to Murder is a chapbook by Kathy Acker published under the imprint Black Widow in 1975. How Love Can Lead Youngsters to Murder is one of the few publications in the series of short stories Acker wrote titled The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec which references the nineteenth century French painter, illustrator and infamous bohemian character. This publication takes the form of a cut-up novel in which Acker draws sources from pop-culture, contemporary politics, and Marxist critical theory. With its root in 1920s Dada literary experimentation, the cut-up novel was popularized by William S. Burroughs and the Situationists. Acker’s interpretation of the form employs the affair of James Dean and a nine-year-old Janis Joplin as the “perfect American love affair,” the reinterpreted plot of Rebel Without a Cause, Henry Kissinger’s political dominance in the 1970s and fake reports from the National Enquirer. Acker interlaces seething cultural critique couched in humorous hollywood gossip and sexual debauchery. This early work of Acker is extremely rare, as this series was often issued in parts handed out to friends or sold by subscription in the 1970s before she gained international attention as an influential postmodern playwright and feminist writer.

Kathy Acker was born in New York in 1947 and became involved in the avant-garde art and punk scene of the East Village in the 1970s and early 1980s. She became known for her unabashed portrayals of sex combined with astute literary and critical theory references in her writing. Pushing back against the assumption that those who took up sex and popular culture as subject matter were less intelligent, Acker used these themes as a trojan horse for her hard hitting theoretical content. Acker’s experimentation with the appropriation of texts, drawing from a wide range of sources, ushered her into international recognition as one of the first postmodern writers. In 1979, she won a Pushcart Prize for her short story “New York City in 1979.” Acker later moved from New York City to London where she wrote some of her most famous works, including Blood and Guts in High School. Acker tragically died of cancer at the age of 50 in Tijuana, Mexico. Acker’s posthumous reputation continues to garner increasing attention. In 2017, American writer and artist Chris Kraus published After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography, the first book-length biography of Acker’s life experiences and literary strategies.