William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs (1914-1997), American writer, painter, and experimental artist. William Seward Burroughs was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and graduated from Harvard University in 1936. He also briefly attended medical school in Vienna, Austria, and graduate school in anthropology at Harvard. Burroughs took a series of odd jobs, and he served briefly in the United States Army before settling in New York City in 1943. In 1944 he met American writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, with whom he helped found the Beat Generation literary movement. In New York, Burroughs also met Joan Vollmer Adams, who became his common-law wife. They had one son, William S. Burroughs, Jr., also a writer. Burroughs's friendships and drug experimentation, in addition to the accidental shooting death of his wife in 1951, shaped his writing style. Starting in 1949, he led an expatriate artist's life in Mexico City, Mexico; Tangier, Morocco; Paris, France; and London, England. He returned to New York in 1974, and he settled in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1981.

Burroughs's literary experimentation is apparent in his novels, which combine visionary intensity, strong social satire, and the use of montage, collage, and improvisation. He was the inventor of the routine (a satirical fantasy the author composes through improvisation), the cutup (a collage technique applied to prose writing in which the writer literally cuts up and recombines text), and pop mythologies (mythologies the writer creates using material from popular culture). His novels include Junky (1953), Naked Lunch (1959), The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), Nova Express (1964), The Wild Boys (1971), Exterminator! (1973), Port of Saints (1975), Cities of the Red Night (1981), Place of Dead Roads (1984), Queer (1985), and The Western Lands (1987). My Education: A Book of Dreams (1995), although a fictional work, mentions numerous events and people from Burrough's life. Ghost of Chance, also published in 1995, deals with drugs and paranoia.

Naked Lunch, based on Burroughs's experience as a drug addict, is acknowledged to be a seminal work. The novel's sexually explicit language and evocation of grotesque images resulted in the book being banned in Boston, Massachusetts. The ban was lifted after a trial in 1965 and 1966 that effectively ended censorship of literature in the United States. Naked Lunch was made into a motion picture in 1991. Burroughs also wrote a number of short experimental prose pieces, short stories, short novels, and essays. He collaborated with other writers and artists on literary, film, musical, and multimedia works. In the 1980s he also became a painter, and he exhibited widely.