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William S. Burroughs This article is about the novelist. For the inventor, his grandfather, see William Seward Burroughs. (February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American novelist, essayist, social critic and spoken word performer. Much of Burroughs' work is semi-autobiographical. He saw all his writing as a single, vast book [1].

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Burroughs was born to a prominent family in St. Louis, Missouri. His grandfather, William Seward Burroughs I, founded the Burroughs Adding Machine company, which evolved into the Burroughs Corporation. Burroughs' mother, Laura Hammon Lee (1888-1970), was the daughter of a minister whose family claimed to be related to Robert E. Lee. His father, Mortimer Perry Burroughs ran an antique and gift shop, first in St. Louis, then in Palm Beach, Florida.

Burroughs attended John Burroughs School in St. Louis, and The Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico. This period, although unexpectedly stressful for him, proved formative. He kept journals documenting an erotic attachment to another boy. These remained undiscovered, and in fact he kept his sexual orientation concealed well into adulthood. He was soon expelled from Los Alamos after taking chloral hydrate in Santa Fe with several fellow students.

He finished high school at Taylor School in St. Louis and, in 1932, left home for an arts degree at Harvard University. This period saw Burroughs introduction to the gay subculture of New York City. He visited lesbian dives, piano bars, and the Harlem and Greenwich Village homosexual underground with a wealthy friend from Kansas City, Richard Stern. Burroughs, who had a lasting fascination with firearms and techniques of self-defense, nearly killed Stern with a mistakenly loaded revolver in an event that would foreshadow things to come.

Burroughs graduated from Harvard University in 1936. During college and much of his later life he received a monthly allowance from his family, although their fortune was not as large as many people assumed (his family had long since sold the rights to his grandfather's invention and had no share in the Burroughs Corporation). Burroughs stated in an interview that he seldom received the money, and when he did, it was rarely enough to free him of responsibilities.

After leaving Harvard, Burroughs traveled to Europe, which proved another window into Austrian and Hungarian Weimar-Era homosexuality; he picked up boys in steam baths in Vienna, and moved in a circle of exiles, queers, and runaways.

In Austria, Burroughs met Ilse Klapper, a Jewish woman fleeing the country’s Nazi government. The two were never romantically involved, but Burroughs married her in Croatia to allow her to gain a United States visa. She made her way to New York City, and eventually divorced Burroughs, although they remained friends for many years.

Burroughs enrolled as a graduate student of Anthropology at Harvard and later enrolled briefly at Medical School in Vienna, Austria. He was enlisted in the U.S Army in 1941 but was discharged for psychological reasons. In New York, he met Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.

In 1944, Burroughs began living with Joan Vollmer Adams in an apartment they shared with Kerouac and Edie Parker, Kerouac's first wife. Vollmer Adams was married to a GI with whom she had a young daughter, Julie Adams. Burroughs and Kerouac got into trouble with the law for failing to report a murder. Burroughs began using morphine and quickly became addicted. He eventually sold heroin in Greenwich Village to support his habit.

Vollmer also became an addict but her drug of choice was the amphetamine, Benzedrine, which was sold over-the-counter as a decongestant inhalant at that time. Because of her addiction and social circle, her husband immediately divorced her after returning from the war. Vollmer would become Burroughs’ common law wife. Burroughs was arrested for forging a narcotics preion and was sentenced to return to his parents' care in St. Louis.

He returned to New York, released Vollmer from the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital and moved with her and her daughter to Texas. Vollmer soon became pregnant with Burroughs’ child. Their son, William S. Burroughs Jr. was born in 1947. The family moved briefly to New Orleans in 1948.

He was arrested after police searched his home and found letters between Burroughs and Ginsberg referring to a possible delivery of marijuana. Burroughs fled to Mexico to escape possible detention in Louisiana's Angola state prison. Vollmer and their children followed him. Burroughs planned to stay in Mexico for at least five years, the length of his charge's statute of limitations.

In 1951, Burroughs accidentally shot and killed Vollmer in a drunken game of 'William Tell' at a party above an American-owned bar in Mexico City. He spent 13 days in jail before the killing was ruled accidental. Vollmer’s daughter, Julie Adams went to live with her grandmother, and William S. Burroughs, Jr. went to St. Louis to live with his grandparents.

Burroughs later said that shooting Vollmer was a pivotal event in his life, and one which instigated his writing: "I am forced to the appaling conclusion that I would have never become a writer but for Joan's death...I live with the constant threat of possession, for control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invador, the Ugly Spirit, and manuvered me into a life long struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out."[2]

After Vollmer's death, Burroughs drifted through South America for several months, looking for a drug called Yage, which could supposedly ease opiate addiction. He produced two novels during this time, exploring his homosexuality. He also compiled correspondence with Allen Ginsberg about his search for and experiences with Yage as "Original Ace Double edition of Junkie (a.k.a. Junky) from 1953, credited to "William Lee". This was Burroughs' first novel publication."

Burroughs went to Rome and then to Tangiers, Morocco, and began to write a large . Under the influence of strong marijuana, Ginsberg and Kerouac helped Burroughs edit these episodes into , although not Burroughs' first foray into the cut-up technique, it was his first venture into a non-linear which shortly thereafter led him into slicing phrases and words up to create new sentences. He was inspired by his friend, Brion Gysin who had been employing the same technique with his paintings. Scenes were slid together with little care for narrative. Perhaps thinking of his crazed medic, Dr Benway, he described it as a book that could be cut into at any point. Although in no sense science fiction, the book also seems to forecast--with eerie prescience--such later phenomena as AIDS, liposuction and the crack epidemic.

Burroughs sold to Olympia Press publisher Maurice Girodias. After the novel was published in 1959, it became infamous across Europe and was popular within countercultures of the 1960s. In countries where the book was banned, copies and even printing plates were smuggled across borders. Once published in the United States, was prosecuted as obscene by the state of Massachusetts, followed by other states. In fact, the stainless steel dildo in this work, Steely Dan, gave the band its name. In 1966 the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court declared the work "not obscene" based on criteria developed largely to defend the book. The case against Burroughs's novel still stands as the last obscenity trial against a work of literature prosecuted in the United States.

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In the 1970s he moved to New York City where Ginsberg helped him find work teaching writing at City College of New York . Burroughs also associated with New York cultural players Andy Warhol, John Giorno, Patti Smith, Susan Sontag, Dennis Hopper, Terry Southern, and Mick Jagger.

The 1970s also saw Burroughs join, then leave the Church of Scientology [3]. His subsequent critical writings about the church and his review of a book entitled by Robert Kaufman led to a battle of letters between Burroughs and Scientology supporters that played out in the pages of .

By late 1980s, Burroughs had become a counterculture giant and collaborated with performers ranging from Bill Laswell's Material and Laurie Anderson to Throbbing Gristle and Ministry, and in Gus Van Sant's 1989 film with musical back-up from producers Hal Willner and Nelson Lyon, and alternative rock band Sonic Youth. He also collaborated with director Robert Wilson and musician Tom Waits to create , a play which opened at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg in 1990, to critical acclaim, and was later performed all over Europe and the U.S. He was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983.

In 1991, with Burroughs’ sanction, director David Cronenberg took on the seemingly impossible task of adapting into a full-length feature film. The film opened to critical acclaim. Through the 1990s, Burroughs produced spoken word recordings, including collaborations with R.E.M., Kurt Cobain, and Ministry. Burroughs lived in Lawrence, Kansas through much of his later life. He lived with several cats who became significant in his personal mythology, and was watched over by friends and proteges.

Burroughs died in Lawrence, at 6:50 p.m. on August 2, 1997 from complications of the previous day's heart attack. A few months after his death, a collection of writings spanning his entire career, , was published. A collection of journal entries written during the final months of Burrough's life were published as the book s from Tangier, Paris and London, blending over into the cut-up and fold-in fiction also mainly based off . The latter novels (besides Naked Lunch) use the famous cut-up and fold-in methods to various extent and are not easily read. is sometimes also referred to as "The Nova Trilogy" or "the Nova Epic". The books have been described by Burroughs as an attempt to create "a mythology for the space age".

Apart from these three themes, Burroughs has also produced numerous essays and a large

Several literary critics treated Burroughs' work harshly. For example Anatole Broyard and Philip Toynbee wrote devastating reviews of some of his most important books. In a short essay entitled Critics constantly complain that writers are lacking in standards, yet they themselves seem to have no standards other than personal prejudice for literary criticism. (...) such standards do exist. Matthew Arnold set up three criteria for criticism: 1. What is the writer trying to do? 2. How well does he succeed in doing it? (...) 3. Does the work exhibit "high seriousness"? That is, does it touch on basic issues of good and evil, life and death and the human condition. I would also apply a fourth criterion (...) More writers fail because they try to write about things they don't know than for any other reason.

Burroughs clearly indicates that he prefers to be evaluated against such criteria over being reviewed based on the reviewer's personal reactions to a certain book. He specifically criticized Anatole Broyard for reading authorial intentionality into his works where there is none. Thus he distanced himself from the movement around New Criticism, by referring to the old school (as exemplified by Matthew Arnold).

Burroughs is often called one of the greatest and most influential writers of the 20th century, most notably by Norman Mailer whose quote on Burroughs, "The only American novelist living today who may be conceivably be possessed by genius", appears on many Burroughs publications. Others, however, consider him overrated. Others still consider his conceptual ideas more influential than his prose.

Burroughs continues to be named as an influence by contemporary fiction writers like William Gibson. The late postmodern writer Kathy Acker often cited Burroughs as her first major influence. He is also cited as a major influence by musicians Patti Smith and Pier Nine Brawl. He remains controversial because of his homosexuality, drug use, and the often criticized obscene or misogynistic tone of his works, though it should be noted that Burroughs' ideas about and attitudes towards women gradually became more friendly as he aged. Burroughs was regarded as being extremely intelligent and a generally quiet person.

The drugs, homosexuality and death themes, common to Burrough's routines, are taken up by Dennis Cooper, of whom Burroughs said, "Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer." Cooper, in return, wrote, in his essay 'King Junk', "along with Jean Genet, John Rechy, and Ginsberg, [Burroughs] helped make homosexuality seem cool and highbrow, providing gay liberation with a delicious edge."

Burroughs' works continue to be referenced years after his death. For example, a November 2004 episode of the TV series included an evil character named Dr. Benway (named for an amoral physician who appears in a number of Burroughs' works). This is an echo of the hospital scene in the movie , made during Burroughs' lifetime, in which both Dr. Benway and Mr. Lee (a Burroughs pen name) are paged.

were published in "restored" editions following Burroughs' death.

Burroughs' son, William S. Burroughs Jr., also wrote two novels: (1996) - 2 CD set; Disc one: "Beats" (dance music using Burroughs' voice and Brion Gysin); Disc two: "Beat" (acoustic sounds and voices) (with John Giorno and Laurie Anderson). He was also featured doing a spoken word piece entitled "Sharkey's Night," on the Laurie Anderson album and made a cameo appearance in the movie. Furthermore, in 1992 he recorded "Quick Fix" with the band Ministry, which appeared on their single for "Just One Fix." The single featured cover art by Burroughs and a remix of the song dubbed the "W.S.B. mix."

Burroughs appeared in a number of cameo roles in various films and videos, such as (1984) by Klaus Maeck. Rundown at Internet Movie Database. He played an aging junkie priest in Drugstore Cowboy by Gus Van Sant. He also made a number of short films in the 1960s based upon his works, directed by Antony Balch. Near the end of his life, recordings of Burroughs reading his short stories "A Junky's Christmas" and "Ah Pook is Here" were used to great effect on the soundtracks of two highly acclaimed animated film adaptations of the pieces. He also gave a reading on by U2. He appears at the end of the video pushing a shopping trolley with a large spotlight positioned inside it. The video ends with a close up of Burrough's eyes. Burroughs' scenes were filmed only a few weeks before his death.

RealityStudio.org -- A Burroughs community featuring a moderated forum, Burroughs texts, exclusive interviews, news, and more.William S. Burroughs -- A French website dedicated to William S. Burroughs featuring news, Burroughs texts and quotations, a gallery and more.Master Musicians of JoujoukaPhotos Gysin '56, Burroughs 50s, Hamri 50s, 71, Master of Joujouka, Paintings Hamri]Other Minds Archive: William Burroughs Press Conference at Berkeley Museum of Art on November 12, 1974 Streaming audio.Naropa Audio Archives: William S. Burroughs class on the technology and ethic of wishing (June 25th, 1986) Streaming audio and 64 kbitNaropa Audio Archives: William S. Burroughs lecture on public discourse. (August 11th, 1980) Streaming audio and 64 kbitThe death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs Research by James W. Grauerholz concerning the shooting of Joan BurroughsReports from the Grey Veil Contemporary cut up poems by Erik Vloeberghs, based on the works of William Burroughs and on other texts found on the Internet and elsewhereUbuweb arts website contains authorized MP3s of many Burroughs recordings, as well as online video of