Burroughs, William S. (1914-1997), was a controversial American novelist. Burroughs strongly influenced younger writers and artists who belonged to the “beat movement” of the 1950’s. The beats were attracted to Burroughs’s unconventional literary style and his often vivid writings about his drug addiction and his homosexuality. They also admired his satirical attacks on modern society.
William Seward Burroughs was born on Feb. 5, 1914, in St. Louis, Missouri, into an upper-middle class family. He was named for his grandfather William Burroughs, the inventor of an improved adding machine (see Burroughs, William). He graduated from Harvard University in 1936, where he studied English literature. Burroughs drifted from job to job for several years. He abused drugs for many years. He moved with his second wife to Mexico, where he killed her in a shooting accident in 1951. He then wandered for a time through the Amazon region of South America. Burroughs lived for many years in France and Morocco as well as in California, New York, and Kansas, where he died on Aug. 2, 1997.
Burroughs’s first novel was Junkie (abridged version 1953, complete version 1977). That book was followed by his most famous novel, the autobiographical The Naked Lunch (published in Paris in 1959; published as Naked Lunch in the United States in 1962). He wrote both books under the name William Lee. The novels describe his drug addiction in vivid and sometimes nightmarish detail. In Naked Lunch, Burroughs randomly cut and assembled pages of his text. He used pages left over from the book to create the novels The Soft Machine (1961, revised 1966), The Ticket That Exploded (1962, revised 1967), and Nova Express (1964).
In the 1970’s, Burroughs began writing fiction in a more traditional style. These works reveal his interest in such topics as space travel and telepathy. They include a book of stories called Cities of the Red Night (1981) and the novels Place of the Dead Roads (1984) and The Western Lands (1987). Burroughs also wrote motion-picture scripts and published two volumes of his correspondence with beat poet Allen Ginsberg.
