William S. Burroughs

American · 1914 to 1997

Born William Seward Burroughs II on February 5, 1914, in St. Louis, Missouri, the younger of two sons of a respectable midwestern antiques dealer and the heir to the Burroughs Adding Machine fortune his grandfather had built, he grew up in a home where, as he later put it, displays of affection were considered embarrassing. He attended John Burroughs School and the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, then read English and anthropology at Harvard, going on to medical school in Vienna before enlisting in the U.S. Army in 1942. In 1943 he met Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in New York, the friendships out of which the Beat Generation would emerge. He began using morphine the same year, and the heroin addiction that followed lasted, on and off, the rest of his life. In Mexico City in 1951, drunk at a party, he attempted to shoot a glass off the head of his common-law wife Joan Vollmer and killed her instead, an act he later said had made him a writer. Junky (1953) appeared under the pen name William Lee. Naked Lunch (1959) became the subject of one of the last great literary obscenity trials in the United States. With Brion Gysin he developed the cut-up method, which gave him the Nova Trilogy and, later, the Red Night Trilogy beginning with Cities of the Red Night (1981). Norman Mailer called him "the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius." Elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983 and given France's Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1984, he died of a heart attack in Lawrence, Kansas, on August 2, 1997, aged eighty-three.