William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs, in full William
Seward Burroughs (b. February 5, 1914,
St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.—d. August 2,
1997, Lawrence, Kansas), American writer
of experimental novels that evoke, in
deliberately erratic prose, a
nightmarish, sometimes wildly humorous
world. His sexual explicitness (he was
an avowed and outspoken homosexual) and
the frankness with which he dealt with
his experiences as a drug addict won him
a following among writers of the Beat
movement.
Burroughs was the grandson of the
inventor of the Burroughs adding machine
and grew up in St. Louis in comfortable
circumstances, graduating from Harvard
University in 1936 and continuing study
there in archaeology and ethnology.
Having tired of the academic world, he
then held a variety of jobs. In 1943
Burroughs moved to New York City, where
he became friends with Jack Kerouac and
Allen Ginsberg, two writers who would
become principal figures in the Beat
movement. Burroughs first took morphine
about 1944, and he soon became addicted
to heroin. That year Lucien Carr, a
member of Burroughs’s social circle,
killed a man whom Carr claimed had made
sexual advances toward him. Before
turning himself in to the police, Carr
confessed to Burroughs and Kerouac, who
were both arrested as material
witnesses. They were later released on
bail, and neither man was charged with a
crime; Carr was convicted of
manslaughter but was later pardoned. In
1945 Burroughs and Kerouac collaborated
on a fictionalized retelling of those
events entitled And the Hippos Were
Boiled in Their Tanks. Rejected by
publishers at the time, it was not
published until 2008.
In 1949 he moved with his second wife to
Mexico, where in 1951 he accidentally
shot and killed her in a drunken prank.
Fleeing Mexico, he wandered through the
Amazon region of South America,
continuing his experiments with drugs, a
period of his life detailed in The Yage
Letters, his correspondence with
Ginsberg written in 1953 but not
published until 1963. Between travels he
lived in London, Paris, Tangier, and New
York City but in 1981 settled in
Lawrence, Kansas.
He used the pen name William Lee in his
first published book, Junkie:
Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict
(1953, reissued as Junky in 1977), an
account of the addict’s life. The Naked
Lunch (Paris, 1959; U.S. title, Naked
Lunch, 1962; filmed 1991) was completed
after his treatment for drug addiction.
All forms of addiction, according to
Burroughs, are counterproductive for
writing, and the only gain to his own
work from his 15 years as an addict came
from the knowledge he acquired of the
bizarre, carnival milieu in which the
drug taker is preyed upon as victim. The
grotesqueness of this world is vividly
satirized in Naked Lunch, which also is
much preoccupied with homosexuality and
police persecution. In the novels that
followed—among them The Soft Machine
(1961), The Wild Boys (1971),
Exterminator! (1973), Cities of the Red
Night (1981), Place of Dead Roads
(1983), Queer (1985), The Western Lands
(1987), and My Education: A Book of
Dreams (1995)—Burroughs further
experimented with the structure of the
novel. Burroughs (1983), by filmmaker
Howard Brookner, is a documentary on the
artist’s life.
