BURROUGHS, William S(eward)

(b. 5 February 1914 in St. Louis, Missouri; d. 2 August 1997 in Lawrence, Kansas), Beat generation novelist who authored Naked Lunch (1959) and served as a counterculture icon for the hippie and punk-rock movements.

The second of two sons born to Mortimer Perry Burroughs, a businessman, and Laura Lee, a descendent of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, William was named after his paternal grandfather, the man who perfected the adding machine and set up the Burroughs Corporation. Raised in an affluent household, Burroughs attended private schools in St. Louis and Los Alamos, New Mexico, before entering Harvard University in 1932. After receiving his B.A. in English in 1936, Burroughs studied medicine briefly at the University of Vienna. There he met Ilse Klapper, a German-Jewish refugee, whom he married in 1937 in order to help her escape from Nazi Germany. Although Klapper immigrated to the United States, she and Burroughs never lived together as man and wife and divorced in 1946.

After his return to the United States, Burroughs took courses in psychology and anthropology at Harvard and Columbia. In the summer of 1942 he was drafted, but he was honorably discharged in September after the Army reviewed his psychiatric history because of his mother's influence. Back in New York City in 1944, he met Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Together they launched the "Beat generation," the most significant literary movement in the second half of the twentieth century. With their rejection of middle-class America's 1950s conformist values and their stress on the importance of individual freedom and expanded consciousness, Ginsberg's "Howl" (1956), Kerouac's On The Road (1957), and Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959), inspired a generation of 1960s rebels bent on political, social, and spiritual reform.

Like the 1960s, however, the Beat movement had its dark side. In August 1944 Burroughs and Kerouac were arrested as material witnesses in a murder case involving two friends, Lucien Carr and David Kammerer. Carr had fatally stabbed Kammerer, a homosexual stalker who had relentlessly pursued him. Around this time Burroughs became addicted to morphine.

Living at 119 West 115th Street in 1945, in a large apartment he shared with Kerouac and his new bride Edie Parker, Burroughs met Parker's roommate Joan Vollmer Adams. Although Burroughs's orientation was homosexual, he and Joan entered into a common-law marriage and she bore him a son, William Burroughs, Jr., in 1947 (he died in 1981). Burroughs and Adams remained together, both heavily abusing drugs, until September 1951 in Mexico City. At a drinking party, Adams challenged Burroughs to shoot a glass off her head in imitation of the legendary William Tell, and he shot her dead.

After Adams's death, Burroughs explored South America in search of the hallucinogenic drug Yage, before settling in Tangier in 1954. For the next few years he struggled with his drug habit and the writing of Naked Lunch, which was published first by Olympia Press in Paris in 1959, and then by Grove Press in the United States in 1962. A savage attack on all forms of power and control, the widely reviewed book was both lavishly praised and roundly condemned. Poet Karl Shapiro declared it to be "one of the most important pieces of literature in our time," while novelist John Wain viewed it as "the merest trash.…" To Norman Mailer, Burroughs was "the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed of genius," but to the state of Massachusetts he was a pornographer. The obscenity trial that followed the publication of the book made Naked Lunch a best-seller. The Massachusetts Supreme Court decision on 7 July 1966, clearing the novel of the obscenity charge, marked a watershed in the history of literary censorship in the United States.

During the early 1960s Burroughs lived mostly in Paris and London. Working with the artist Brion Gysin, he discovered a new method of composition he called the "cutup." This involved cutting up his own texts as well as others and randomly pasting them together. The process yielded interesting, sometimes startling results. With the cut-up method, Burroughs believed he had found a way to bypass the ultimate source of control—language itself. He used the cut-up heavily in The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964), a trilogy devoted to an alien Nova mob and their plan to conquer planet Earth. By the end of the decade the United States was to land a man on the Moon. Burroughs sought to create a new mythology commensurate with America's quest for a "New Frontier": "This is the space age," he proclaimed, "we are here to go.…"

In the late 1960s London was a mecca for experimental arts. Burroughs took a flat at 8 Duke Street and remained there for the next eight years. Through his friend Ian Sommerville, he met Paul McCartney, and in 1967 he appeared on the album cover of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

In August 1968 Esquire magazine asked Burroughs to cover the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, along with Terry Southern and Jean Genet. The delegates were meeting at the Conrad Hilton Hotel to choose between Hubert H. Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy, but the real drama took place in Chicago's streets, as 20,000 police and National Guard troops clashed with Yippie (Youth International Party) demonstrators, led by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, who had come to protest the Vietnam War and celebrate a "festival of life." The confrontation turned into a nationally televised bloodbath. Burroughs joined his friend Allen Ginsberg in the front lines of the march from Lincoln Park, although he had little faith in either the Yippie's provocative theatrics or Ginsberg's "flower power" as effective agents of political change. Before returning to London, Burroughs saw Jack Kerouac one last time. The "king of the Beats" died on 21 October 1969.

Burroughs remained productive throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Following The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (1971), he began work on the Red Night trilogy, which included Cities of the Red Night (1981), The Place of the Dead Roads (1984), and The Western Lands (1987). He returned to New York City in 1973 and taught writing in the master of fine arts program at City College in fall 1974. From 1975 to 1981 Burroughs lived at "the Bunker" at 222 Bowery. His proximity to the music club CBGB's put him in close touch with the punk-rock scene. In 1981, at the urging of his secretary, James Grauerholz, Burroughs moved to Lawrence, Kansas, where he lived quietly until his death of heart failure. He is buried in Bellfontaine Cemetery in St. Louis.

Writing in the New York Times Book Review, critic Perry Meisel remarked, "By the time the counterculture of the 1960s succeeded the Beats, license had become law, and Mr. Burroughs had become a principal avatar of the liberationist esthetic he helped create." Burroughs's contempt for authority, combined with his surreal treatment of violence, homosexuality, and drug addiction, appealed to young people, particularly musicians. The bands Soft Machine, the Mugwumps, and Steely Dan all derived their names from his books. He collaborated with a host of rock stars including Laurie Anderson, Kurt Cobain, U2, and Tom Waits, and is credited with coining the term "heavy metal" to describe this subgenre of rock music. Burroughs's pervasive influence on popular culture, however, was not without its price. Ironically, his growing popularity, which led to television and film appearances, even a Nike commercial, helped turn a literary outlaw into a pop icon.

Manuscripts and papers relating to Burroughs are in the libraries of Ohio State University, Columbia University, and Arizona State University. Biographies include Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (1988), a detailed, well-researched work written with Burroughs's cooperation; and Barry Miles, William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible (1993). Jennie Skerl, William S. Burroughs (1985), also contains biographical material. Published correspondence includes The Yage Letters, with Allen Ginsberg (1963); Letters to Allen Ginsberg 1953–1957 (1982); and The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1945–1959 (1993). The Job (1970, revised and enlarged edition 1974), interviews with Daniel Odier, is a good source on Burroughs's life and art through the 1960s. Conversations with William S. Burroughs (1999), and Burroughs Live 1960–1999 (2001), contain the collected interviews from 1960 onward. The latter is more extensive and includes Conrad Knickerbocker, Paris Review (fall 1965) interview. Victor Bockris, With William Burroughs: A Report From the Bunker (1981), contains interviews and dinner conversations with literary and artistic friends including Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, and Mick Jagger. Last Words (2000), is a journal recording Burroughs's final thoughts between 14 November 1996 and 29 July 1997. Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader (1999), excerpts from a lifetime's work, includes valuable biographical introductions for each section by Burroughs's longtime companion and literary executor James Grauerholz, as well as an accompanying compact disc of Burroughs reading from his work. His unique voice, a cross between T. S. Eliot and W. C. Fields, is preserved on numerous other recordings, including Call Me Burroughs (1965), Dead City Radio (1990), and Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales (1993). Howard Brookner, Burroughs: The Movie (1983), is an informative and entertaining documentary film. Obituaries are in the New York Times, (London) Guardian, and Washington Post (all 4 Aug. 1997).

William M. Gargan