William S. Burroughs

William Seward Burroughs II (February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American writer and visual artist. He is widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a postmodern author who influenced underground and popular culture and literature. Much of Burroughs's work is experimental and features unreliable narrators. Also noted as semi-autobiographical, his work often drew from his experiences with drug addiction, and featured his various places of residence as settings in much of his work. With Brion Gysin, Burroughs popularized the cut-up, an aleatory literary technique. His writing also engaged frequent mystical, occult, or otherwise magical themes, constant preoccupations in his fiction and real life.

Born into a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, Burroughs attended Harvard University, where he studied English, then anthropology as a postgraduate, and went on to medical school in Vienna. In 1942, he enlisted in the U.S. Army to serve during World War II. After being turned down by both the Office of Strategic Services and the Navy, he veered into substance abuse, beginning with morphine and developing a heroin addiction that would affect him for the rest of his life. In 1943, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac while living in New York City. This liaison would become the foundation of the Beat Generation, later a defining influence on the 1960s counterculture.

Burroughs found success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), published under the pen name William Lee. He had largely completed the novel before he killed his second wife, Joan Vollmer, in 1951 in Mexico City; he was convicted of manslaughter in absentia and received a two-year suspended sentence. His third novel, Naked Lunch (1959), became the subject of one of the last literary censorship cases in the United States after its US publisher, Grove Press, was sued for violating a Massachusetts obscenity statute. He also wrote The Nova Trilogy (1961–1964) which extensively featured the cut-up technique, and The Red Night Trilogy: Cities of the Red Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1983) and The Western Lands (1987).