William Seward Burroughs II (; February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American writer and visual artist, widely considered a primary figure of the
Beat Generation
The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-war era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Generatio ...
and a major
postmodern
Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourseNuyen, A.T., 1992. The Role of Rhetorical Devices in Postmodernist Discourse. Philosophy & Rhetoric, pp.183–194. characterized by skepticism toward the " grand narratives" of moderni ...
author who influenced popular culture and literature.
[Stevens, Matthew Levi (2014). The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs. Mandrake of Oxford.] Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays, and five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences; he was initially briefly known by the pen name William Lee. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, made many appearances in films, and created and exhibited thousands of visual artworks, including his celebrated "Shotgun Art".
Burroughs was born into a wealthy family in
St. Louis, Missouri. He was a grandson of inventor
William Seward Burroughs I
William Seward Burroughs I (January 28, 1857 – September 14, 1898) was an American inventor born in Rochester, New York.
Life and career
Personal life
Burroughs was the son of a mechanic and worked with machines throughout his childhood. ...
, who founded the
Burroughs Corporation, and a nephew of public relations manager
Ivy Lee
Ivy Ledbetter Lee (July 16, 1877 – November 9, 1934) was an American publicity expert and a founder of modern public relations. Lee is best known for his public relations work with the Rockefeller Family.
His first major client was the Penns ...
. Burroughs attended
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
, studied English, studied
anthropology
Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of behavi ...
as a postgraduate, and attended medical school in Vienna. In 1942, Burroughs enlisted in the U.S. Army to serve during World War II. After being turned down by the
Office of Strategic Services
The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was the intelligence agency of the United States during World War II. The OSS was formed as an agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines for all branc ...
and the
Navy
A navy, naval force, or maritime force is the branch of a nation's armed forces principally designated for naval warfare, naval and amphibious warfare; namely, lake-borne, riverine, littoral zone, littoral, or ocean-borne combat operations and ...
, he developed a
heroin addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, initially beginning with
morphine
Morphine is a strong opiate that is found naturally in opium, a dark brown resin in poppies (''Papaver somniferum''). It is mainly used as a analgesic, pain medication, and is also commonly used recreational drug, recreationally, or to make ...
. In 1943, while living in New York City, he befriended
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Gener ...
and
Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac (; March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969), known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.
Of French-Canadian a ...
. Their mutual influence became the foundation of the
Beat Generation
The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-war era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Generatio ...
, which was later a defining influence on the
1960s counterculture
The counterculture of the 1960s was an anti-establishment cultural phenomenon that developed throughout much of the Western world in the 1960s and has been ongoing to the present day. The aggregate movement gained momentum as the civil rights mo ...
. Burroughs found success with his confessional first novel, ''
Junkie
Junkie is a pejorative usually referring to a person with an addiction.
Entertainment and media
* ''Junkie'' (novel), a novel by William S. Burroughs
* "Junkie" (song), 2013 song by Medina featuring Svenstrup & Vendelboe
* ''The Junkies'', a ...
'' (1953), but is perhaps best known for his third novel, ''
Naked Lunch'' (1959). ''Naked Lunch'' became the subject of one of the last major literary censorship cases in the United States after its US publisher,
Grove Press
Grove Press is an United States of America, American Imprint (trade name), publishing imprint that was founded in 1947. Imprints include: Black Cat, Evergreen, Venus Library, and Zebra. Barney Rosset purchased the company in 1951 and turned it in ...
, was sued for violating a Massachusetts obscenity statute.
Burroughs killed his second wife,
Joan Vollmer, in 1951 in Mexico City. Burroughs initially claimed that he shot Vollmer while drunkenly attempting a
"William Tell" stunt. He later told investigators that he had been showing his pistol to friends when it fell and hit the table, firing the bullet that killed Vollmer. After Burroughs returned to the United States, he was convicted of
manslaughter
Manslaughter is a common law legal term for homicide considered by law as less culpable than murder. The distinction between murder and manslaughter is sometimes said to have first been made by the ancient Athenian lawmaker Draco in the 7th cen ...
''
in absentia'' and received a two-year suspended sentence.
While heavily experimental and featuring
unreliable narrator
An unreliable narrator is a narrator whose credibility is compromised. They can be found in fiction and film, and range from children to mature characters. The term was coined in 1961 by Wayne C. Booth in ''The Rhetoric of Fiction''. While unrel ...
s, much of Burroughs' work is semiautobiographical, and was often drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict. He lived variously in
Mexico City
Mexico City ( es, link=no, Ciudad de México, ; abbr.: CDMX; Nahuatl: ''Altepetl Mexico'') is the capital and largest city of Mexico, and the most populous city in North America. One of the world's alpha cities, it is located in the Valley o ...
, London, Paris and the
Tangier International Zone
The Tangier International Zone ( ''Minṭaqat Ṭanja ad-Dawliyya'', , es, Zona Internacional de Tánger) was a international zone centered on the city of Tangier, Morocco, which existed from 1924 until its reintegration into independent Moroc ...
near
Morocco
Morocco (),, ) officially the Kingdom of Morocco, is the westernmost country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It overlooks the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and has land borders with Algeria to ...
, and traveled in the
Amazon rainforest
The Amazon rainforest, Amazon jungle or ; es, Selva amazónica, , or usually ; french: Forêt amazonienne; nl, Amazoneregenwoud. In English, the names are sometimes capitalized further, as Amazon Rainforest, Amazon Forest, or Amazon Jungle. ...
, with these locations featuring in many of his novels and stories. With
Brion Gysin
Brion Gysin (19 January 1916 – 13 July 1986) was a British-Canadian painter, writer, sound poet, performance artist and inventor of experimental devices.
He is best known for his use of the cut-up technique, alongside his close friend, the ...
, Burroughs popularized the
cut-up
The cut-up technique (or ''découpé'' in French) is an aleatory literary technique in which a written text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. The concept can be traced to the Dadaists of the 1920s, but it was developed and popularized ...
, an
aleatory
Aleatoricism or aleatorism, the noun associated with the adjectival aleatory and aleatoric, is a term popularised by the musical composer Pierre Boulez, but also Witold Lutosławski and Franco Evangelisti (composer), Franco Evangelisti, for compo ...
literary technique
A narrative technique (known for literary fictional narratives as a literary technique, literary device, or fictional device) is any of several specific methods the creator of a narrative uses to convey what they want
—in other words, a stra ...
, featuring heavily in works such as ''
The Nova Trilogy'' (1961–1964). Burroughs' work also features frequent
mystical,
occult
The occult, in the broadest sense, is a category of esoteric supernatural beliefs and practices which generally fall outside the scope of religion and science, encompassing phenomena involving otherworldly agency, such as magic and mysticism a ...
, or otherwise
magical themes, which were a constant preoccupation for Burroughs, both in fiction and in real life.
[
In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the ]American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters
The American Academy of Arts and Letters is a 300-member honor society whose goal is to "foster, assist, and sustain excellence" in American literature, music, and art. Its fixed number membership is elected for lifetime appointments. Its headqua ...
. In 1984, he was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
The ''Ordre des Arts et des Lettres'' (Order of Arts and Letters) is an order of France established on 2 May 1957 by the Minister of Culture. Its supplementary status to the was confirmed by President Charles de Gaulle in 1963. Its purpose is ...
by France. Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the "greatest satirical
Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of shaming or e ...
writer since Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745) was an Anglo-Irish Satire, satirist, author, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whig (British political party), Whigs, then for the Tories (British political party), Tories), poe ...
";[''Naked Lunch: The Restored Text'', Harper Perennial Modern Classics (2005). It includes an introduction by J. G. Ballard and an appendix of biography and reference to further reading: "About the author", "About the book", and "Read on".] he owed this reputation to his "lifelong subversion"[Burroughs, 2003. Penguin Modern Classics edition of ''Junky''.] of the moral, political, and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism
To be sardonic is to be disdainfully or cynically humorous, or scornfully mocking.
A form of wit or humour, being sardonic often involves expressing an uncomfortable truth in a clever and not necessarily malicious way, often with a degree of sk ...
. J. G. Ballard considered Burroughs to be "the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War", while Norman Mailer
Nachem Malech Mailer (January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007), known by his pen name Norman Kingsley Mailer, was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, activist, filmmaker and actor. In a career spanning over six decades, Mailer ...
declared him "the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius".
Early life and education
Burroughs was born in 1914, the younger of two sons born to Mortimer Perry Burroughs (June 16, 1885 – January 5, 1965) and Laura Hammon Lee (August 5, 1888 – October 20, 1970). His family was of prominent English ancestry
The English people are an ethnic group and nation native to England, who speak the English language in England, English language, a West Germanic languages, West Germanic language, and share a common history and culture. The English identi ...
in St. Louis, Missouri. His grandfather, William Seward Burroughs I
William Seward Burroughs I (January 28, 1857 – September 14, 1898) was an American inventor born in Rochester, New York.
Life and career
Personal life
Burroughs was the son of a mechanic and worked with machines throughout his childhood. ...
, founded the Burroughs Adding Machine company, which evolved into the Burroughs Corporation. Burroughs' mother was Laura Hammond Lee Burroughs, whose brother, Ivy Lee
Ivy Ledbetter Lee (July 16, 1877 – November 9, 1934) was an American publicity expert and a founder of modern public relations. Lee is best known for his public relations work with the Rockefeller Family.
His first major client was the Penns ...
, was an advertising pioneer later employed as a publicist for the Rockefellers. His father ran an antique and gift shop, Cobblestone Gardens in St. Louis; and later in Palm Beach, Florida
Palm Beach is an incorporated town in Palm Beach County, Florida. Located on a barrier island in east-central Palm Beach County, the town is separated from several nearby cities including West Palm Beach and Lake Worth Beach by the Intracoas ...
when they relocated. Burroughs would later write of growing up in a "family where displays of affection were considered embarrassing".[
It was during his childhood that Burroughs' developed a lifelong interest in ]magic
Magic or Magick most commonly refers to:
* Magic (supernatural), beliefs and actions employed to influence supernatural beings and forces
* Ceremonial magic, encompasses a wide variety of rituals of magic
* Magical thinking, the belief that unrela ...
and the occult
The occult, in the broadest sense, is a category of esoteric supernatural beliefs and practices which generally fall outside the scope of religion and science, encompassing phenomena involving otherworldly agency, such as magic and mysticism a ...
– topics which would find their way into his work repeatedly across the years. Burroughs later described how he saw an apparition of a green reindeer in the woods as a child, which he identified as a totem animal, as well as a vision of ghostly grey figures at play in his bedroom.
As a boy, Burroughs lived on Pershing Avenue (now Pershing Place) in St. Louis' Central West End. He attended John Burroughs School in St. Louis where his first published essay, "Personal Magnetism" – which revolved around telepathic mind-control – was printed in the ''John Burroughs Review'' in 1929. He then attended the Los Alamos Ranch School
Los Alamos Ranch School was a private ranch school for boys in the northeast corner of Sandoval County, New Mexico (since 1949, within Los Alamos County), USA, founded in 1917 near San Ildefonso Pueblo. During World War II, the school was bought ...
in New Mexico, which was stressful for him. The school was a boarding school for the wealthy, "where the spindly sons of the rich could be transformed into manly specimens".[ Burroughs kept journals documenting an erotic attachment to another boy. According to his own account, he destroyed these later, ashamed of their content.] He kept his sexual orientation concealed from his family well into adulthood. A common story says that he was expelled from Los Alamos after taking chloral hydrate in Santa Fe with a fellow student. Yet, according to his own account, he left voluntarily: "During the Easter vacation of my second year I persuaded my family to let me stay in St. Louis."
Harvard University
Burroughs finished high school at Taylor School in Clayton, Missouri
Clayton is a city in and the seat of St. Louis County, Missouri. It borders the independent city of St. Louis. The population was 17,355 at the 2020 census. Organized in 1877, the city was named after Ralph Clayton, who donated the land for the ...
, and in 1932 left home to pursue an arts degree at Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
, where he was affiliated with Adams House. During the summers, he worked as a cub reporter for the ''St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The ''St. Louis Post-Dispatch'' is a major regional newspaper based in St. Louis, Missouri, serving the St. Louis metropolitan area. It is the largest daily newspaper in the metropolitan area by circulation, surpassing the ''Belleville News-Dem ...
'', covering the police docket. He disliked the work, and refused to cover some events, like the death of a drowned child. He lost his virginity in an East St. Louis, Illinois brothel that summer with a female prostitute whom he regularly patronized.[ While at Harvard, Burroughs made trips to New York City and was introduced to the gay subculture there. He visited lesbian dives, piano bars, and the ]Harlem
Harlem is a neighborhood in Upper Manhattan, New York City. It is bounded roughly by the Hudson River on the west; the Harlem River and 155th Street (Manhattan), 155th Street on the north; Fifth Avenue on the east; and 110th Street (Manhattan), ...
and Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village ( , , ) is a neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City, bounded by 14th Street to the north, Broadway to the east, Houston Street to the south, and the Hudson River to the west. Greenwich Village ...
homosexual underground with Richard Stern, a wealthy friend from Kansas City
The Kansas City metropolitan area is a bi-state metropolitan area anchored by Kansas City, Missouri. Its 14 counties straddle the border between the U.S. states of Missouri (9 counties) and Kansas (5 counties). With and a population of more ...
. They would drive from Boston to New York in a reckless fashion. Once, Stern scared Burroughs so badly that he asked to be let out of the vehicle.[
Burroughs graduated from Harvard in 1936. According to Ted Morgan's ''Literary Outlaw'',][
]His parents, upon his graduation, had decided to give him a monthly allowance of $200 out of their earnings from Cobblestone Gardens, a substantial sum in those days. It was enough to keep him going, and indeed it guaranteed his survival for the next twenty-five years, arriving with welcome regularity. The allowance was a ticket to freedom; it allowed him to live where he wanted to and to forgo employment.
Burroughs' parents sold the rights to his grandfather's invention and had no share in the Burroughs Corporation. Shortly before the 1929 stock market crash
The Wall Street Crash of 1929, also known as the Great Crash, was a major American stock market crash that occurred in the autumn of 1929. It started in September and ended late in October, when share prices on the New York Stock Exchange colla ...
, they sold their stock for $200,000 (equivalent to approximately $ in today's funds).
Europe
After Burroughs graduated from Harvard, his formal education ended, except for brief flirtations with graduate study of anthropology
Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of behavi ...
at Columbia and medicine in Vienna, Austria. He traveled to Europe and became involved in Austrian and Hungarian Weimar
Weimar is a city in the state of Thuringia, Germany. It is located in Central Germany between Erfurt in the west and Jena in the east, approximately southwest of Leipzig, north of Nuremberg and west of Dresden. Together with the neighbouri ...
-era LGBT culture
LGBT culture is a culture shared by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer individuals. It is sometimes referred to as queer culture (indicating people who are queer), while the term gay culture may be used to mean "LGBT culture" o ...
; he picked up young men in steam baths in Vienna and moved in a circle of exiles, homosexuals, and runaways. There, he met Ilse Klapper, born Herzfeld (1900–1982), a Jewish woman fleeing the country's Nazi
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in ...
government. The two were never romantically involved, but Burroughs married her, in Croatia
, image_flag = Flag of Croatia.svg
, image_coat = Coat of arms of Croatia.svg
, anthem = "Lijepa naša domovino"("Our Beautiful Homeland")
, image_map =
, map_caption =
, capit ...
, against the wishes of his parents, to allow her to gain a visa to the United States. She made her way to New York City, and eventually divorced Burroughs, although they remained friends for many years.[ After returning to the United States, he held a string of uninteresting jobs. In 1939, his mental health became a concern for his parents, especially after he deliberately severed the last joint of his left little finger at the knuckle to impress a man with whom he was infatuated. This event made its way into his early fiction as the short story "The Finger."
]
Beginning of the Beats
Burroughs enlisted in the U.S. Army early in 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor
Pearl Harbor is an American lagoon harbor on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, west of Honolulu. It was often visited by the Naval fleet of the United States, before it was acquired from the Hawaiian Kingdom by the U.S. with the signing of the Re ...
brought the United States into World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
. But when he was classified as a not an officer, he became dejected. His mother recognized her son's depression and got Burroughs a civilian disability discharge – a release from duty based on the premise that he should have not been allowed to enlist due to previous mental instability. After being evaluated by a family friend, who was also a neurologist at a psychiatric treatment center, Burroughs waited five months in limbo at Jefferson Barracks outside St. Louis before being discharged. During that time he met a Chicago soldier also awaiting release, and once Burroughs was free, he moved to Chicago and held a variety of jobs, including one as an exterminator
Exterminator may refer to:
*A practitioner in pest control
Competition
*Exterminator (horse) (1915–1945), racehorse, the winner of the 1918 Kentucky Derby
*X-Terminator, a competitor in '' Robot Wars''
Fiction
* Exterminator!, a 1973 short s ...
. When two of his friends from St. Louis – University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...
student Lucien Carr and his admirer, David Kammerer – left for New York City, Burroughs followed.
Joan Vollmer
In 1944, Burroughs began living with Joan Vollmer Adams in an apartment they shared with Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac (; March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969), known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.
Of French-Canadian a ...
and Edie Parker
Edie Kerouac-Parker (September 20, 1922 – October 29, 1993) was the author of the memoir ''You'll Be Okay'', about her life with her first husband, Jack Kerouac, and the early days of the Beat Generation. While an art student under Georg ...
, Kerouac's first wife. Vollmer Adams was married to a G.I.
G.I. are initials used to describe the soldiers of the United States Army and airmen of the United States Air Force and general items of their equipment. The term G.I. has been used as an initialism of "Government Issue", "General Issue", or " ...
with whom she had a young daughter, Julie Adams.
Burroughs and Kerouac got into trouble with the law for failing to report a murder involving Lucien Carr, who had killed David Kammerer in a confrontation over Kammerer's incessant and unwanted advances. This incident inspired Burroughs and Kerouac to collaborate on a novel titled ''And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
''And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks'' is a novel by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. It was written in 1945, a full decade before the two authors became famous as leading figures of the Beat Generation, and remained unpublished in co ...
'', completed in 1945. The two fledgling authors were unable to get it published, but the manuscript was eventually published in November 2008 by Grove Press
Grove Press is an United States of America, American Imprint (trade name), publishing imprint that was founded in 1947. Imprints include: Black Cat, Evergreen, Venus Library, and Zebra. Barney Rosset purchased the company in 1951 and turned it in ...
and Penguin Books
Penguin Books is a British publishing, publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year.[morphine
Morphine is a strong opiate that is found naturally in opium, a dark brown resin in poppies (''Papaver somniferum''). It is mainly used as a analgesic, pain medication, and is also commonly used recreational drug, recreationally, or to make ...]
and became addicted. He eventually sold heroin in Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village ( , , ) is a neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City, bounded by 14th Street to the north, Broadway to the east, Houston Street to the south, and the Hudson River to the west. Greenwich Village ...
to support his habit. Vollmer also became an addict, but her drug of choice was Benzedrine
Amphetamine (contracted from alpha- methylphenethylamine) is a strong central nervous system (CNS) stimulant that is used in the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), narcolepsy, and obesity. It is also commonly used a ...
, an amphetamine
Amphetamine (contracted from alpha- methylphenethylamine) is a strong central nervous system (CNS) stimulant that is used in the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), narcolepsy, and obesity. It is also commonly used ...
sold over the counter at that time. Because of her addiction and social circle, her husband immediately divorced her after returning from the war. With urging from Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Gener ...
, and also perhaps Kerouac, Burroughs became intellectually and emotionally linked with Vollmer and by summer 1945, had moved in with Vollmer and her daughter. In spring 1946, Burroughs was arrested for forging a narcotics prescription. Vollmer asked her psychiatrist, Lewis Wolberg, to sign a surety bond for Burroughs' release. As part of his release, Burroughs returned to St. Louis under his parents' care, after which he left for Mexico to get a divorce from Ilse Klapper. Meanwhile, Vollmer's addiction led to a temporary psychosis that resulted in her admission to Bellevue Hospital, which endangered the custody of her child. Upon hearing this, Burroughs immediately returned to New York City to gain her release, asking her to marry him. Their marriage was never formalized, but she lived as his common-law wife
Common-law marriage, also known as non-ceremonial marriage, marriage, informal marriage, or marriage by habit and repute, is a legal framework where a couple may be considered married without having formally registered their relation as a civil ...
. They returned to St. Louis to visit Burroughs' parents and then moved with her daughter to Texas. Vollmer soon became pregnant with Burroughs' child. Their son, William S. Burroughs Jr.
William Seward Burroughs III (July 21, 1947 – March 3, 1981) was an American novelist, also known as William S. Burroughs Jr. and Billy Burroughs. He bears the name of both his father and his great-grandfather, William Seward Burroughs I, ...
, was born in 1947. The family moved briefly to New Orleans in 1948.
Mexico and South America (1950–1952)
Burroughs fled to Mexico to escape possible detention in Louisiana's Angola state prison
The Louisiana State Penitentiary (known as Angola, and nicknamed the "Alcatraz of the South", "The Angola Plantation" and "The Farm"Sutton, Keith "Catfish".Out There: Angola angling. ''ESPN Outdoors''. May 31, 2006. Retrieved on August 25, 2010. ...
. 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. Burroughs also attended classes at the Mexico City College in 1950, studying Spanish, as well as "Mexican picture writing" (codices
The codex (plural codices ) was the historical ancestor of the modern book. Instead of being composed of sheets of paper, it used sheets of vellum, papyrus, or other materials. The term ''codex'' is often used for ancient manuscript books, with ...
) and the Mayan language with R. H. Barlow.
Vollmer's death
Their life in Mexico was by all accounts an unhappy one. Without heroin and suffering from Benzedrine
Amphetamine (contracted from alpha- methylphenethylamine) is a strong central nervous system (CNS) stimulant that is used in the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), narcolepsy, and obesity. It is also commonly used a ...
abuse, Burroughs began to pursue other men as his libido returned, while Vollmer, feeling abandoned, started to drink heavily and mock Burroughs openly. One night while drinking with friends at a party above the American-owned Bounty Bar in Mexico City, a drunk Burroughs allegedly took his handgun from his travel bag and told his wife, "It's time for our William Tell act." There is no indication that they had performed such an action previously.[ Vollmer, who was also drinking heavily and undergoing ]amphetamine
Amphetamine (contracted from alpha- methylphenethylamine) is a strong central nervous system (CNS) stimulant that is used in the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), narcolepsy, and obesity. It is also commonly used ...
withdrawal, allegedly obliged him by putting a highball glass on her head. Burroughs shot Vollmer in the head, killing her almost immediately.
Soon after the incident, Burroughs changed his account, claiming that he had dropped his gun and it had accidentally fired. Burroughs spent 13 days in jail before his brother came to Mexico City and bribed Mexican lawyers and officials to release Burroughs on bail while he awaited trial for the killing, which was ruled culpable homicide. 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 reported every Monday morning to the jail in Mexico City while his prominent Mexican attorney worked to resolve the case. According to James Grauerholz
James Grauerholz (born December 14, 1953) is a writer and editor. He is the bibliographer and literary executor of the estate of William S. Burroughs.
Life and career
Grauerholz was born in Coffeyville, Kansas and attended the University of Kans ...
, two witnesses had agreed to testify that the gun had fired accidentally while he was checking to see if it was loaded, with ballistics experts bribed to support this story.[ Nevertheless, the trial was continuously delayed and Burroughs began to write what would eventually become the short novel '']Queer
''Queer'' is an umbrella term for people who are not heterosexual or cisgender. Originally meaning or , ''queer'' came to be used pejoratively against those with same-sex desires or relationships in the late 19th century. Beginning in the lat ...
'' while awaiting his trial. Upon Burroughs' attorney fleeing Mexico in light of his own legal problems, Burroughs decided, according to Ted Morgan, to "skip" and return to the United States. He was convicted ''in absentia'' of homicide and was given a two-year suspended sentence.[
Although Burroughs was writing before the shooting of Joan Vollmer, this event marked him and, biographers argue, his work for the rest of his life.][ Vollmer's death also resonated with ]Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Gener ...
, who wrote of her in ''Dream Record: June 8, 1955,'' "Joan, what kind of knowledge have the dead? Can you still love your mortal acquaintances? What do you remember of us?" In ''Burroughs: The Movie'', Ginsberg said that Vollmer had seemed possibly suicidal in the weeks leading up to her death, and he suggested that this may have been a factor in her willingness to take part in the risky William Tell stunt.
''The Yage Letters''
After leaving Mexico, Burroughs drifted through South America for several months, seeking out a drug called yagé
AyahuascaPronounced as in the UK and in the US. Also occasionally known in English as ''ayaguasca'' (Spanish-derived), ''aioasca'' (Brazilian Portuguese-derived), or as ''yagé'', pronounced or . Etymologically, all forms but ''yagé'' descen ...
, which promised to give the user telepathic abilities. A book composed of letters between Burroughs and Ginsberg, '' The Yage Letters,'' was published in 1963 by City Lights Books. In 2006, a re-edited version, ''The Yage Letters Redux'', showed that the letters were largely fictionalised from Burroughs' notes.
Beginning of literary career
Burroughs described Vollmer's death as a pivotal event in his life, and one that provoked his writing by exposing him to the risk of possession
Possession may refer to:
Law
* Dependent territory, an area of land over which another country exercises sovereignty, but which does not have the full right of participation in that country's governance
* Drug possession, a crime
* Ownership
* ...
by a malevolent entity he called "the Ugly Spirit":
I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a life long struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.[''Queer'', Penguin, 1985, p. xxiii.]
As Burroughs makes clear, he meant this reference to "possession" to be taken absolutely literally, stating: "My concept of possession is closer to the medieval model than to modern psychological explanations ... I mean a definite possessing entity." Burroughs' writing was intended as a form of "sorcery", in his own words[Stevens, Matthew Levi. ''The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs.'' p.125.] – to disrupt language via methods such as the cut-up technique
The cut-up technique (or ''découpé'' in French) is an aleatory literary technique in which a written text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. The concept can be traced to the Dadaists of the 1920s, but it was developed and popularized ...
, and thus protect himself from possession. Later in life, Burroughs described the Ugly Spirit as "Monopolistic, acquisitive evil. Ugly evil. The ugly American", and took part in a shamanic ceremony with the explicit aim of exorcising the Ugly Spirit.[William S. Burroughs, interviewed by Allen Ginsberg (1992). Published as ''The Ugly Spirit'' in ''Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs 1960–1997.'' 2001.]
Oliver Harris has questioned Burroughs' claim that Vollmer's death catalysed his writing, highlighting the importance for ''Queer'' of Burroughs' traumatic relationship with the boyfriend fictionalized in the story as Eugene Allerton, rather than the shooting of Vollmer. In any case, he had begun to write in 1945. Burroughs and Kerouac collaborated on ''And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
''And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks'' is a novel by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. It was written in 1945, a full decade before the two authors became famous as leading figures of the Beat Generation, and remained unpublished in co ...
'', a mystery novel loosely based on the Carr–Kammerer situation and that at the time remained unpublished. Years later, in the documentary ''What Happened to Kerouac?'', Burroughs described it as "not a very distinguished work". An excerpt of this work, in which Burroughs and Kerouac wrote alternating chapters, was finally published in ''Word Virus'',James Grauerholz
James Grauerholz (born December 14, 1953) is a writer and editor. He is the bibliographer and literary executor of the estate of William S. Burroughs.
Life and career
Grauerholz was born in Coffeyville, Kansas and attended the University of Kans ...
. ''Word Virus'', New York: Grove, 1998. a compendium of William Burroughs' writing that was published by his biographer after his death in 1997. The complete novel was finally published by Grove Press in 2008.
Before killing Vollmer, Burroughs had largely completed his first novel, ''Junkie
Junkie is a pejorative usually referring to a person with an addiction.
Entertainment and media
* ''Junkie'' (novel), a novel by William S. Burroughs
* "Junkie" (song), 2013 song by Medina featuring Svenstrup & Vendelboe
* ''The Junkies'', a ...
'', which he wrote at the urging of Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Gener ...
, who was instrumental in getting the work published as a cheap mass-market paperback.["William S. Burroughs.]
Biography.com.
/ref> Ace Books
Ace Books is a publisher of science fiction (SF) and fantasy books founded in New York City in 1952 by Aaron A. Wyn. It began as a genre publisher of mysteries and westerns, and soon branched out into other genres, publishing its first scienc ...
published the novel in 1953 as part of an Ace Double under the pen name William Lee, retitling it ''Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict'' (it was later republished as ''Junkie'', then in 1977 as ''Junky'', and finally in 2003 as ''Junky: the definitive text of 'Junk','' edited by Oliver Harris').
Overseas
During 1953, Burroughs was at loose ends. Due to legal problems, he was unable to live in the cities toward which he was most inclined. He spent time with his parents in Palm Beach, Florida
Palm Beach is an incorporated town in Palm Beach County, Florida. Located on a barrier island in east-central Palm Beach County, the town is separated from several nearby cities including West Palm Beach and Lake Worth Beach by the Intracoas ...
, and in New York City with Allen Ginsberg. When Ginsberg refused his romantic advances, Burroughs went to Rome to meet Alan Ansen
Alan Ansen (January 23, 1922 – November 12, 2006) was an American poet, playwright, and associate of Beat Generation writers. He was a widely read scholar who knew many languages. Ansen grew up on Long Island and was educated at Harvard. He wo ...
on a vacation financed from his parents' continuing support. He found Rome and Ansen's company dreary and, inspired by Paul Bowles
Paul Frederic Bowles (; December 30, 1910November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. He became associated with the Moroccan city of Tangier, where he settled in 1947 and lived for 52 years to the end of his ...
' fiction, he decided to head for the Tangier International Zone
The Tangier International Zone ( ''Minṭaqat Ṭanja ad-Dawliyya'', , es, Zona Internacional de Tánger) was a international zone centered on the city of Tangier, Morocco, which existed from 1924 until its reintegration into independent Moroc ...
,[ where he rented a room and began to write a large body of text that he personally referred to as '' Interzone''.
To Burroughs, all signs directed a return to Tangier, a city where drugs were freely available and where financial support from his family would continue. He realized that in the Moroccan culture he had found an environment that synchronized with his temperament and afforded no hindrances to pursuing his interests and indulging in his chosen activities. He left for Tangier in November 1954 and spent the next four years there working on the fiction that would later become ''Naked Lunch'', as well as attempting to write commercial articles about Tangier. He sent these writings to Ginsberg, his literary agent for ''Junkie'', but none was published until 1989 when ''Interzone'', a collection of short stories, was published. Under the strong influence of a ]marijuana
Cannabis, also known as marijuana among other names, is a psychoactive drug from the cannabis plant. Native to Central or South Asia, the cannabis plant has been used as a drug for both recreational and entheogenic purposes and in various tra ...
confection known as majoun
Majoun or majun ( ar, معجون) is a Moroccan confection, which can resemble a pastry ball, fudge, or jam. Ingredients can include honey, nuts, and dried fruits, and the treat is commonly made as a cannabis edible, sometimes in combination with ...
and a German-made opioid
Opioids are substances that act on opioid receptors to produce morphine-like effects. Medically they are primarily used for pain relief, including anesthesia. Other medical uses include suppression of diarrhea, replacement therapy for opioid us ...
called Eukodol, Burroughs settled in to write. Eventually, Ginsberg and Kerouac, who had traveled to Tangier in 1957, helped Burroughs type, edit, and arrange these episodes into ''Naked Lunch''.[
]
''Naked Lunch''
Whereas ''Junkie'' and ''Queer'' were conventional in style, ''Naked Lunch'' was his first venture into a nonlinear
In mathematics and science, a nonlinear system is a system in which the change of the output is not proportional to the change of the input. Nonlinear problems are of interest to engineers, biologists, physicists, mathematicians, and many other ...
style. After the publication of ''Naked Lunch'', a book whose creation was to a certain extent the result of a series of contingencies, Burroughs was exposed to Brion Gysin
Brion Gysin (19 January 1916 – 13 July 1986) was a British-Canadian painter, writer, sound poet, performance artist and inventor of experimental devices.
He is best known for his use of the cut-up technique, alongside his close friend, the ...
's cut-up technique
The cut-up technique (or ''découpé'' in French) is an aleatory literary technique in which a written text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. The concept can be traced to the Dadaists of the 1920s, but it was developed and popularized ...
at the Beat Hotel
The Beat Hotel was a small, run-down hotel of 42 rooms at 9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur in the Latin Quarter of Paris, notable chiefly as a residence for members of the Beat poetry movement of the mid-20th century.
Overview
It was a "class 13" hotel, mean ...
in Paris in October 1959. He began slicing up phrases and words to create new sentences. At the Beat Hotel, Burroughs discovered "a port of entry" into Gysin's canvases: "I don't think I had ever seen painting until I saw the painting of Brion Gysin." The two would cultivate a long-term friendship that revolved around a mutual interest in artworks and cut-up techniques. Scenes were slid together with little care for narrative.
Excerpts from ''Naked Lunch'' were first published in the United States in 1958. The novel was initially rejected by City Lights Books, the publisher of Ginsberg's ''Howl
Howl most often refers to:
*Howling, an animal vocalization in many canine species
*Howl (poem), a 1956 poem by Allen Ginsberg
Howl may also refer to:
Film
* ''The Howl'', a 1970 Italian film
* ''Howl'' (2010 film), a 2010 American arthouse b ...
''; and Olympia Press publisher Maurice Girodias
Maurice Girodias (12 April 1919 – 3 July 1990) was a French publisher who founded the Olympia Press, specialising in risqué books, censored in Britain and America, that were permitted in France in English-language versions only. It evol ...
, who had published English-language novels in France that were controversial for their subjective views of sex and antisocial characters. Nevertheless, Ginsberg managed to get excerpts published in ''Black Mountain Review
The Black Mountain poets, sometimes called projectivist poets, were a group of mid-20th-century American ''avant-garde'' or postmodern poets centered on Black Mountain College in North Carolina.
Background
Although it lasted only twenty-three y ...
'' and ''Chicago Review
''Chicago Review'' is a literary magazine founded in 1946 and published quarterly in the Humanities Division at the University of Chicago. The magazine features contemporary poetry, fiction, and criticism, often publishing works in translation and ...
'' in 1958. Irving Rosenthal, student editor of ''Chicago Review'', a quarterly journal partially subsidized by the university, promised to publish more excerpts from ''Naked Lunch'', but he was fired from his position in 1958 after ''Chicago Daily News
The ''Chicago Daily News'' was an afternoon daily newspaper in the midwestern United States, published between 1875 and 1978 in Chicago, Illinois.
History
The ''Daily News'' was founded by Melville E. Stone, Percy Meggy, and William Dougherty ...
'' columnist Jack Mabley
Jack Arnold Mabley (October 26, 1915 – January 6, 2006) was an American newspaper reporter and columnist.
Early life and career
Mabley was born on October 26, 1915, in Binghamton, New York, to Clarence Ware Mabley (born Clarence Ware Mable) ...
called the first excerpt obscene. Rosenthal went on to publish more in his newly created literary journal ''Big Table No. 1''; however, the United States Postmaster General ruled that copies could not be mailed to subscribers on the basis of obscenity laws. John Ciardi did get a copy and wrote a positive review of the work, prompting a telegram from Allen Ginsberg praising the review. This controversy made ''Naked Lunch'' interesting to Girodias again, and he published the novel in 1959.
After the novel was published, it became notorious across Europe and the United States, garnering interest from not just members of the counterculture of the 1960s
The counterculture of the 1960s was an anti-establishment cultural phenomenon that developed throughout much of the Western world in the 1960s and has been ongoing to the present day. The aggregate movement gained momentum as the civil rights mo ...
, but also literary critics such as Mary McCarthy. Once published in the United States, ''Naked Lunch'' was prosecuted as obscene by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, followed by other states. In 1966, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) is the court of last resort, highest court in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Although the claim is disputed by the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, the SJC claims the di ...
declared the work "not obscene" on the basis of criteria developed largely to defend the book. The case against Burroughs' novel still stands as the last obscenity trial against a work of literature – that is, a work consisting of words only, and not including illustrations or photographs – prosecuted in the United States.
The ''Word Hoard'', the collection of manuscripts that produced '' Naked Lunch'', also produced parts of the later works ''The Soft Machine
''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things already mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the m ...
'' (1961), ''The Ticket That Exploded
''The Ticket That Exploded'' is a 1962 novel by American author William S. Burroughs, published by Olympia Press and later by Grove Press in 1967. Together with '' The Soft Machine'' and ''Nova Express'' it is part of a trilogy, referred to as ' ...
'' (1962), and ''Nova Express
''Nova Express'' is a 1964 novel by American author William S. Burroughs. It was written using the 'fold-in' method, a version of the cut-up method, developed by Burroughs with Brion Gysin, of enfolding snippets of different texts into the novel ...
'' (1964). These novels feature extensive use of the cut-up technique that influenced all of Burroughs' subsequent fiction to a degree. During Burroughs' friendship and artistic collaborations with Gysin and Ian Sommerville, the technique was combined with images, Gysin's paintings, and sound, via Somerville's tape recorders. Burroughs was so dedicated to the cut-up method that he often defended his use of the technique before editors and publishers, most notably Dick Seaver at Grove Press
Grove Press is an United States of America, American Imprint (trade name), publishing imprint that was founded in 1947. Imprints include: Black Cat, Evergreen, Venus Library, and Zebra. Barney Rosset purchased the company in 1951 and turned it in ...
in the 1960s[ and ]Holt, Rinehart & Winston
Holt McDougal is an American publishing company, a division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, that specializes in textbooks for use in high schools.
The Holt name is derived from that of U.S. publisher Henry Holt (1840–1926), co-founder of the e ...
in the 1980s. The cut-up method, because of its random or mechanical basis for text generation, combined with the possibilities of mixing in text written by other writers, deemphasizes the traditional role of the writer as creator or originator of a string of words, while simultaneously exalting the importance of the writer's sensibility as an editor. In this sense, the cut-up method may be considered as analogous to the collage
Collage (, from the french: coller, "to glue" or "to stick together";) is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts, but in music too, by which art results from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole. ...
method in the visual arts. New restored editions of The Nova Trilogy (or Cut-Up Trilogy), edited by Oliver Harris (President of the European Beat Studies Network) and published in 2014, included notes and materials to reveal the care with which Burroughs used his methods and the complex histories of his manuscripts.
Paris and the "Beat Hotel"
Burroughs moved into a rundown hotel in the Latin Quarter of Paris in 1959 when ''Naked Lunch'' was still looking for a publisher. Tangier
Tangier ( ; ; ar, طنجة, Ṭanja) is a city in northwestern Morocco. It is on the Moroccan coast at the western entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar, where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Spartel. The town is the cap ...
, with its political unrest, and criminals with whom he had become involved, became dangerous to Burroughs. He went to Paris to meet Ginsberg and talk with Olympia Press. He left behind a criminal charge which eventually caught up with him in Paris. Paul Lund, a British former career criminal and cigarette smuggler whom Burroughs met in Tangier, was arrested on suspicion of importing narcotics into France. Lund gave up Burroughs, and evidence implicated Burroughs in the importation of narcotics into France. When the Moroccan authorities forwarded their investigation to French officials, Burroughs faced criminal charges in Paris for conspiracy to import opiates. It was during this impending case that Maurice Girodias
Maurice Girodias (12 April 1919 – 3 July 1990) was a French publisher who founded the Olympia Press, specialising in risqué books, censored in Britain and America, that were permitted in France in English-language versions only. It evol ...
published ''Naked Lunch''; its appearance helped to get Burroughs a suspended sentence, since a literary career, according to Ted Morgan, is a respected profession in France.
The "Beat Hotel
The Beat Hotel was a small, run-down hotel of 42 rooms at 9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur in the Latin Quarter of Paris, notable chiefly as a residence for members of the Beat poetry movement of the mid-20th century.
Overview
It was a "class 13" hotel, mean ...
" was a typical European-style boarding house hotel, with common toilets on every floor, and a small place for personal cooking in the room. Life there was documented by the photographer Harold Chapman
Harold Stephen Chapman (26 March 1927 – 19 August 2022) was a British photographer noted for chronicling the 1950s in Paris.
Biography
Chapman was born in Deal, Kent on 26 March 1927. He produced a large body of work over many years, with ...
, who lived in the attic room. This shabby, inexpensive hotel was populated by Gregory Corso
Gregory Nunzio Corso (March 26, 1930 – January 17, 2001) was an American poet and a key member of the Beat movement. He was the youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers (with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burrough ...
, Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky for several months after ''Naked Lunch'' first appeared.
Burroughs' time at the Beat Hotel was dominated by occult experiments – "mirror-gazing, scrying, trance and telepathy, all fuelled by a wide variety of mind-altering drugs".[Stevens, Matthew Levi. ''The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs.'' p.50.] Later, Burroughs would describe "visions" obtained by staring into the mirror for hours at a time – his hands transformed into tentacles, or his whole image transforming into some strange entity, or visions of far-off places,[William S. Burroughs, letter to Brion Gysin, January 17, 1959. ''The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945 to 1959.'' Viking Penguin, 1993.] or of other people rapidly undergoing metamorphosis. It was from this febrile atmosphere that the famous cut-up technique
The cut-up technique (or ''découpé'' in French) is an aleatory literary technique in which a written text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. The concept can be traced to the Dadaists of the 1920s, but it was developed and popularized ...
emerged.
The actual process by which ''Naked Lunch'' was published was partly a function of its "cut-up" presentation to the printer. Girodias had given Burroughs only ten days to prepare the manuscript for print galleys, and Burroughs sent over the manuscript in pieces, preparing the parts in no particular order. When it was published in this authentically random manner, Burroughs liked it better than the initial plan. International rights to the work were sold soon after, and Burroughs used the $3,000 advance from Grove Press
Grove Press is an United States of America, American Imprint (trade name), publishing imprint that was founded in 1947. Imprints include: Black Cat, Evergreen, Venus Library, and Zebra. Barney Rosset purchased the company in 1951 and turned it in ...
to buy drugs (equivalent to approximately $ in today's funds).[ ''Naked Lunch'' was featured in a 1959 ''Life (magazine), Life'' magazine cover story, partly as an article that highlighted the growing Beat literary movement. During this time Burroughs found an outlet for material otherwise rendered unpublishable in Jeff Nuttall's ''My Own Mag''. Also, poetry by Burroughs' appeared in the avant garde little magazine Nomad (magazine), ''Nomad'' at the beginning of the 1960s.
]
The London years
Burroughs left Paris for London in 1960 to visit Dr. Dent, a well-known English medical doctor who spearheaded a reputedly painless heroin withdrawal treatment using the drug apomorphine. Dent's apomorphine cure was also used to treat alcoholism, although it was held by several people who undertook it to be no more than straightforward aversion therapy. Burroughs however was convinced. Following his first cure, he wrote a detailed appreciation of apomorphine and other cures, which he submitted to ''The British Journal of Addiction'' (Vol. 53, 1956) under the title "Letter From A Master Addict To Dangerous Drugs"; this letter is appended to many editions of ''Naked Lunch''.
Though he ultimately relapsed, Burroughs ended up working out of London for six years, traveling back to the United States on several occasions, including one time escorting his son to the Federal Medical Center, Lexington, Lexington Narcotics Farm and Prison after the younger Burroughs had been convicted of prescription fraud in Florida. In the "Afterword" to the compilation of his son's two previously published novels ''Speed'' and ''Kentucky Ham'', Burroughs writes that he thought he had a "small habit" and left London quickly without any narcotics because he suspected the U.S. customs would search him very thoroughly on arrival. He claims he went through the most excruciating two months of opiate withdrawal while seeing his son through his trial and sentencing, traveling with Billy to Lexington, Kentucky from Miami to ensure that his son entered the hospital that he had once spent time in as a volunteer admission. Earlier, Burroughs revisited St. Louis, Missouri, taking a large advance from ''Playboy'' to write an article about his trip back to St. Louis, one that was eventually published in ''The Paris Review'', after Burroughs refused to alter the style for ''Playboy''’s publishers. In 1968 Burroughs joined Jean Genet, John Sack, and Terry Southern in covering the 1968 Democratic National Convention for ''Esquire (magazine), Esquire'' magazine. Southern and Burroughs, who had first become acquainted in London, would remain lifelong friends and collaborators. In 1972, Burroughs and Southern unsuccessfully attempted to adapt ''Naked Lunch'' for the screen in conjunction with American game-show producer Chuck Barris.
Burroughs supported himself and his addiction by publishing pieces in small literary presses. His avant-garde reputation grew internationally as hippies and college students discovered his earlier works. He developed a close friendship with Antony Balch and lived with a young hustler named John Brady who continuously brought home young women despite Burroughs' protestations. In the midst of this personal turmoil, Burroughs managed to complete two works: a novel written in screenplay format, ''The Last Words of Dutch Schultz'' (1969); and the traditional prose-format novel ''The Wild Boys (novel), The Wild Boys'' (1971).
It was during his time in London that Burroughs began using his "Playback (technique), playback" technique in an attempt to place curses on various people and places who had drawn his ire, including the Moka coffee bar[#refP-Orridge2, P-Orridge, Genesis. ''Magick Squares and Future Beats''] and the London HQ of Scientology. Burroughs himself related the Moka coffee bar incident:
Here is a sample operation carried out against the Moka Bar at 29 Frith Street, London, W1, beginning on August 3, 1972. Reverse Thursday. Reason for operation was outrageous and unprovoked discourtesy and poisonous cheesecake. Now to close in on the Moka Bar. Record. Take pictures. Stand around outside. Let them see me. They are seething around in there ... Playback would come later with more pictures ... Playback was carried out a number of times with more pictures. Their business fell off. They kept shorter and shorter hours. October 30, 1972, the Moka Bar closed. The location was taken over by the Queen's Snack Bar.
In the 1960s, Burroughs joined and then left the Church of Scientology. In talking about the experience, he claimed that the techniques and philosophy of Scientology helped him and that he felt that further study of Scientology would produce great results. He was skeptical of the organization itself, and felt that it fostered an environment that did not accept critical discussion. His subsequent critical writings about the church and his review of ''Inside Scientology: How I Joined Scientology and Became Superhuman, Inside Scientology'' by Robert Kaufman led to a battle of letters between Burroughs and Scientology supporters in the pages of ''Rolling Stone'' magazine.
Return to United States
In 1974, concerned about his friend's well-being, Allen Ginsberg gained for Burroughs a contract to teach creative writing at the City College of New York. Burroughs successfully withdrew from heroin use and moved to New York. He eventually found an apartment, affectionately dubbed "The Bunker", on the Lower East Side of Manhattan at 222 Bowery. The dwelling was a partially converted YMCA gym, complete with lockers and communal showers. The building fell within New York City rent control policies that made it extremely cheap; it was only about four hundred dollars a month until 1981 when the rent control rules changed, doubling the rent overnight. Burroughs added "teacher" to the list of jobs he did not like, as he lasted only a semester as a professor; he found the students uninteresting and without much creative talent. Although he needed income desperately, he turned down a teaching position at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, University at Buffalo for $15,000 a semester. "The teaching gig was a lesson in never again. You were giving out all this energy and nothing was coming back."[ His savior was the newly arrived twenty-one-year-old bookseller and Beat Generation devotee ]James Grauerholz
James Grauerholz (born December 14, 1953) is a writer and editor. He is the bibliographer and literary executor of the estate of William S. Burroughs.
Life and career
Grauerholz was born in Coffeyville, Kansas and attended the University of Kans ...
, who worked for Burroughs part-time as a secretary as well as in a bookstore. Grauerholz suggested the idea of reading tours. Grauerholz had managed several rock bands in Kansas and took the lead in booking for Burroughs reading tours that would help support him throughout the next two decades. It raised his public profile, eventually aiding in his obtaining new publishing contracts. Through Grauerholz, Burroughs became a monthly columnist for the noted popular culture magazine ''Crawdaddy (magazine), Crawdaddy'', for which he interviewed Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page in 1975. Burroughs decided to relocate back to the United States permanently in 1976. He then began to associate with New York cultural players such as Andy Warhol, John Giorno, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and Susan Sontag, frequently entertaining them at the Bunker; he also visited venues like CBGB to watch the likes of Patti Smith perform. Throughout early 1977, Burroughs collaborated with Southern and Dennis Hopper on a screen adaptation of ''Junky''. It was reported in ''The New York Times'' that Burroughs himself would appear in the film. Financed by a reclusive acquaintance of Burroughs, the project lost traction after financial problems and creative disagreements between Hopper and Burroughs.
In 1976 he appeared in Rosa von Praunheims New York documentary ''Underground & Emigrants''.
Organized by Columbia professor Sylvère Lotringer, Giorno, and Grauerholz, the Nova Convention was a multimedia retrospective of Burroughs' work held from November 30 to December 2, 1978, at various locations throughout New York. The event included readings from Southern, Ginsberg, Smith, and Frank Zappa (who filled in at the last minute for Keith Richards, then entangled in a legal problem), in addition to panel discussions with Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson and concerts featuring The B-52's, Suicide (band), Suicide, Philip Glass, and Debbie Harry and Chris Stein.
In 1976, Burroughs was having dinner with his son, William S. "Billy" Burroughs Jr., and Allen Ginsberg in Boulder, Colorado, at Ginsberg's Buddhist poetry school (Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics) at Chogyam Trungpa's Naropa University when Billy began to vomit blood. Burroughs Sr. had not seen his son for over a year and was alarmed at his appearance when Billy arrived at Ginsberg's apartment. Although Billy had successfully published two short novels in the 1970s and was deemed by literary critics like Ann Charters as a bona fide "second generation beat writer", his brief marriage to a teenage waitress had disintegrated. Billy was a constant drinker, and there were long periods when he was out of contact with any of his family or friends. The diagnosis was liver cirrhosis so complete that the only treatment was a rarely performed liver transplant operation. Fortunately, the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, University of Colorado Medical Center was one of two places in the nation that performed transplants under the pioneering work of Dr. Thomas Starzl. Billy underwent the procedure and beat the thirty-percent survival odds. His father spent time in 1976 and 1977 in Colorado, helping Billy through additional surgeries and complications. Ted Morgan's biography asserts that their relationship was not spontaneous and lacked real warmth or intimacy. Allen Ginsberg was supportive to both Burroughs and his son throughout the long period of recovery.[
In London, Burroughs had begun to write what would become the first novel of a trilogy, published as ''Cities of the Red Night'' (1981), ''The Place of Dead Roads'' (1983), and ''The Western Lands'' (1987). Grauerholz helped edit ''Cities'' when it was first rejected by Burroughs' long-time editor Dick Seaver at Holt Rinehart, after it was deemed too disjointed. The novel was written as a straight narrative and then chopped up into a more random pattern, leaving the reader to sort through the characters and events. This technique differed from the author's earlier cut-up methods, which were accidental from the start. Nevertheless, the novel was reassembled and published, still without a straight linear form, but with fewer breaks in the story. The trilogy featured time-travel adventures in which Burroughs' narrators rewrote episodes from history to reform mankind.][ Reviews were mixed for ''Cities''. Novelist and critic Anthony Burgess panned the work in ''Saturday Review (U.S. magazine), Saturday Review'', saying Burroughs was boring readers with repetitive episodes of Pederasty, pederast fantasy and sexual strangulation that lacked any comprehensible world view or theology; other reviewers, like J. G. Ballard, argued that Burroughs was shaping a new literary "mythography".][
In 1981, Billy Burroughs died in Florida. He had cut off contact with his father several years before, even publishing an article in ''Esquire'' magazine claiming his father had poisoned his life and revealing that he had been molested as a fourteen-year-old by one of his father's friends while visiting Tangier. The Liver transplantation, liver transplant had not cured his urge to drink, and Billy suffered from serious health complications years after the operation. After he had stopped taking his immunosuppressive drug, transplant rejection drugs, he was found near the side of a Florida highway by a stranger. He died shortly afterward. Burroughs was in New York when he heard from Allen Ginsberg of Billy's death.
Burroughs, by 1979, was once again addicted to heroin. The cheap heroin that was easily purchased outside his door on the Lower East Side "made its way" into his veins, coupled with "gifts" from the overzealous if well-intentioned admirers who frequently visited the Bunker. Although Burroughs would have episodes of being free from heroin, from this point until his death he was regularly addicted to the drug. In an introduction to ''Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs'', James Grauerholz (who managed Burroughs' reading tours in the 1980s and 1990s) mentions that part of his job was to deal with the "underworld" in each city to secure the author's drugs.
]
Later years in Kansas
Burroughs moved to Lawrence, Kansas in 1981, taking up residence at 1927 Learnard Avenue where he would spend the rest of his life. He once told a Wichita Eagle reporter that he was content to live in Kansas, saying, "The thing I like about Kansas is that it's not nearly as violent, and it's a helluva lot cheaper. And I can get out in the country and fish and shoot and whatnot." In 1984, he signed a seven-book deal with Viking Press after he signed with literary agent Andrew Wylie. This deal included the publication rights to the unpublished 1952 novel ''Queer
''Queer'' is an umbrella term for people who are not heterosexual or cisgender. Originally meaning or , ''queer'' came to be used pejoratively against those with same-sex desires or relationships in the late 19th century. Beginning in the lat ...
''. With this money he purchased a small bungalow for $29,000.[ He was finally inducted into the ]American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters
The American Academy of Arts and Letters is a 300-member honor society whose goal is to "foster, assist, and sustain excellence" in American literature, music, and art. Its fixed number membership is elected for lifetime appointments. Its headqua ...
in 1983 after several attempts by Allen Ginsberg to get him accepted. He attended the induction ceremony in May 1983. Lawrence Ferlinghetti remarked the induction of Burroughs into the Academy proved Herbert Marcuse's point that capitalistic society had a great ability to incorporate its one-time outsiders.[
By this point, Burroughs was a counterculture icon. In his final years, he cultivated an entourage of young friends who replaced his aging contemporaries. In the 1980s he collaborated with performers ranging from Bill Laswell's Material (band), Material and Laurie Anderson to Throbbing Gristle. Burroughs and R.E.M. collaborated on the song "Star Me Kitten" on the ''Songs in the Key of X: Music from and Inspired by the X-Files'' album. A collaboration with musicians Nick Cave and Tom Waits resulted in a collection of short prose, ''Smack My Crack'', later released as a spoken-word album in 1987. In 1990, he released the spoken word album ''Dead City Radio,'' with musical backup from producers Hal Willner and Nelson Lyon, and alternative rock band Sonic Youth. He collaborated with Tom Waits and director Robert Wilson (director), Robert Wilson on ''The Black Rider'', a play that opened at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg in 1990 to critical acclaim, one that was later performed across Europe and the U.S. In 1991, with Burroughs' approval, director David Cronenberg adapted '' Naked Lunch'' into a feature film, which opened to critical acclaim.
During 1982, Burroughs developed a painting technique whereby he created abstract compositions by placing spray paint cans in front of blank surfaces, and then shooting at the paint cans with a shotgun. These splattered and shot panels and canvasses were first exhibited in the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York City in 1987. By this time he had developed a comprehensive visual art practice, using ink, spray paint, collage and unusual things such as mushrooms and plungers to apply the paint. He created file-folder paintings featuring these mediums as well as "automatic calligraphy" inspired by Brion Gysin. He originally used the folders to mix pigments before observing that they could be viewed as art in themselves. He also used many of these painted folders to store manuscripts and correspondence in his personal archive
Until his last years, he prolifically created visual art. Burroughs' work has since been featured in more than fifty international galleries and museums including Royal Academy of the Arts, Centre Pompidou, Guggenheim Museum, ZKM Karlsruhe, Sammlung Falckenberg, New Museum, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art.
According to Ministry (band), Ministry frontman Al Jourgensen, "We hung out at Burroughs's house one time in '93. So he decides to shoot up heroin and he takes out this utility belt full of syringes. Huge, old-fashioned ones from the '50s or something. Now, I have no idea how an 80 year old guy finds a vein, but he knew what he was doing. So we're all laying around high and stuff and then I notice in the pile of mail on the coffee table that there's a letter from the White House. I said 'Hey, this looks important.' and he replies 'Nah, it's probably just junk mail.' Well, I open the letter and it's from Bill Clinton, President Clinton inviting Burroughs to the White House for a poetry reading. I said 'Wow, do you have any idea how big this is!?' So he says 'What? Who's president nowadays?' and it floored me. He didn't even know who our current president was."][ Includes the discography section on pp. 275-278. Between pp. 128 and 129 there are 12 pages of pictures.]
In 1990, Burroughs was honored with a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.
In June 1991, Burroughs underwent triple Coronary artery bypass surgery, bypass surgery.
He became a member of a chaos magic organization, the Illuminates of Thanateros, in 1993.
Burroughs' last filmed performance was in the music video for "Last Night on Earth (U2 song), Last Night on Earth" by Irish rock band U2, filmed in Kansas City, Missouri, directed by Richie Smyth and also featuring Sophie Dahl.
Political beliefs
The only newspaper columnist Burroughs admired was Westbrook Pegler, a right-wing opinion shaper for the William Randolph Hearst newspaper chain.[ re-published ] Burroughs believed in frontier individualism, which he championed as "our glorious frontier heritage on minding your own business." Burroughs came to equate liberalism with bureaucratic tyranny, viewing government authority as a collective of meddlesome forces legislating the curtailment of personal freedom. According to his biographer Ted Morgan, his philosophy for living one's life was to adhere to a laissez-faire path, one without encumbrances – in essence a credo shared with the capitalist business world.[ His abhorrence of the government did not prevent Burroughs from using its programs to his own advantage. In 1949 he enrolled in Mexico City College under the GI Bill, which paid for part of his tuition and books and provided him with a seventy-five-dollar-per-month stipend. He maintained, "I always say, keep your snout in the public trough."][
Burroughs was a gun enthusiast and owned several shotguns, a Colt Single Action Army, Colt .45 and a .38 Special. Sonic Youth vocalist Thurston Moore recounted meeting Burroughs: "he had a number of ''Guns and Ammo'' magazines laying about, and he was only very interested in talking about shooting and knifing ... I asked him if he had a Beretta and he said: 'Ah, that's a ladies' pocket-purse gun. I like guns that shoot and knives that cut." Hunter S. Thompson gave him a one-of-a-kind .454 Casull, .454 caliber pistol. He was also a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment.
]
Magical beliefs
Burroughs had a longstanding preoccupation with magic
Magic or Magick most commonly refers to:
* Magic (supernatural), beliefs and actions employed to influence supernatural beings and forces
* Ceremonial magic, encompasses a wide variety of rituals of magic
* Magical thinking, the belief that unrela ...
and the occult
The occult, in the broadest sense, is a category of esoteric supernatural beliefs and practices which generally fall outside the scope of religion and science, encompassing phenomena involving otherworldly agency, such as magic and mysticism a ...
, dating from his earliest childhood, and was insistent throughout his life that we live in a "magical universe". As he himself explained:
In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen. The dogma of science is that the will cannot possibly affect external forces, and I think that's just ridiculous. It's as bad as the church. My viewpoint is the exact contrary of the scientific viewpoint. I believe that if you run into somebody in the street it's for a reason. Among primitive people they say that if someone was bitten by a snake he was murdered. I believe that.
Or, speaking in the 1970s:
Since the word "magic" tends to cause confused thinking, I would like to say exactly what I mean by "magic" and the magical interpretation of so-called reality. The underlying assumption of magic is the assertion of "will" as the primary moving force in this universe – the deep conviction that nothing happens unless somebody or some being wills it to happen. To me this has always seemed self evident ... From the viewpoint of magic, no death, no illness, no misfortune, accident, war or riot is accidental. There are no accidents in the world of magic.
This was no idle passing interest – Burroughs also actively ''practiced'' magic in his everyday life: seeking out mystical visions through practices like scrying, taking measures to protect himself from spirit possession, possession,[James Grauerholz, ''On Burroughs and Dharma'', Summer Writing Institute, June 24, 1999, Naropa University. Transcript published in ''Beat Scene Magazine'', No.71a, Winter 2014.] and attempting to lay curses on those who had crossed him. Burroughs spoke openly about his magical practices, and his engagement with the occult is attested from a multitude of interviews, as well as personal accounts from those who knew him.
Biographer Ted Morgan has argued that: "As the single most important thing about Graham Greene was his viewpoint as a lapsed Catholic, the single most important thing about Burroughs was his belief in the magical universe. The same impulse that led him to put out curses was, as he saw it, the source of his writing ... To Burroughs behind everyday reality there was the reality of the spirit world, of psychic visitations, of curses, of possession and phantom beings."[
Burroughs was unwavering in his insistence that his writing itself had a magical purpose. This was particularly true when it came to his use of the cut-up technique. Burroughs was adamant that the technique had a magical function, stating "the cut ups are not for artistic purposes".][#refHarris, Harris, Oliver. ''William S. Burroughs: Beating Postmodernism''] Burroughs used his cut-ups for "political warfare, scientific research, personal therapy, magical divination, and conjuration" – the essential idea being that the cut-ups allowed the user to "break down the barriers that surround consciousness".[#refBurroughs, Burroughs, William S. ''The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs''] As Burroughs himself stated:
I would say that my most interesting experience with the earlier techniques was the realization that when you make cut-ups you do not get simply random juxtapositions of words, that they do mean something, and often that these meanings refer to some future event. I've made many cut-ups and then later recognized that the cut-up referred to something that I read later in a newspaper or a book, or something that happened ... Perhaps events are pre-written and pre-recorded and when you cut word lines the future leaks out.
In the final decade of his life, Burroughs became heavily involved in the chaos magic movement. Burroughs' magical techniques – the cut-up, Playback (technique), playback, etc. – had been incorporated into chaos magic by such practitioners as Phil Hine, Dave Lee[#refLee, Lee, Dave. ''Cut Up and Collage in Magic''] and Genesis P-Orridge.[#refP-Orridge, P-Orridge, Genesis. ''Thee Psychick Bible''] P-Orridge in particular had known and studied under Burroughs and Brion Gysin for over a decade. This led to Burroughs contributing material to the book ''Between Spaces: Selected Rituals & Essays From The Archives Of Templum Nigri Solis'' Through this connection, Burroughs came to personally know many of the leading lights of the chaos magic movement, including Hine, Lee, Peter J. Carroll, Ian Read (musician), Ian Read and Ingrid Fischer, as well as Douglas Grant, head of the North American section of chaos magic group the Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT).[Grauerholz, James interviewed June 25, 2010, by Steve Foland. ''Taking the broooooaaaaad view of things: A Conversation with James Grauerholz on William S. Burroughs and Magick,'' Online at https://pop-damage.com/?p=5393 ] Burroughs' involvement with the movement further deepened, as he contributed artwork and other material to chaos magic books, addressed an IOT gathering in Austria, and was eventually fully initiated into the Illuminates of Thanateros. As Burroughs' close friend James Grauerholz states: "William was very serious about his studies in, and initiation into the IOT ... Our longtime friend, Douglas Grant, was a prime mover."
Death
Burroughs died August 2, 1997, in Lawrence, Kansas, from complications of a heart attack he had suffered the previous day.[ He was interred in the family plot in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri, with a marker bearing his full name and the epitaph "American Writer". His grave lies to the right of the white granite obelisk of William Seward Burroughs I (1857–1898).
]
Posthumous works
Since 1997, several posthumous collections of Burroughs' work have been published. A few months after his death, a collection of writings spanning his entire career, ''Word Virus'', was published (according to the book's introduction, Burroughs himself approved its contents prior to his death). Aside from numerous previously released pieces, ''Word Virus'' also included what was promoted as one of the few surviving fragments of ''And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
''And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks'' is a novel by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. It was written in 1945, a full decade before the two authors became famous as leading figures of the Beat Generation, and remained unpublished in co ...
'', a novel by Burroughs and Kerouac. The complete Kerouac/Burroughs manuscript ''And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
''And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks'' is a novel by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. It was written in 1945, a full decade before the two authors became famous as leading figures of the Beat Generation, and remained unpublished in co ...
'' was published for the first time in November 2008.
A collection of journal entries written during the final months of Burroughs' life was published as the book ''Last Words'' in 2000. Publication of a memoir by Burroughs entitled ''Evil River'' by Viking Press has been delayed several times; after initially being announced for a 2005 release, online booksellers indicated a 2007 release, complete with an ISBN (), but it remains unpublished.
New enlarged or unexpurgated editions of numerous texts have been published in recent years as "Restored Text" or "Redux" editions all containing additional material and essays on the works or incorporating material edited out of previous versions. Beginning with Barry Miles and James Grauerholz' 2003 edition of Naked Lunch, followed by Oliver Harris reconstructions of three trilogies of writings. The first of these are the early writings ''Junky:the definitive text of "Junk"'' (2003), ''Queer: 25th-Anniversary Edition'' (2010) and The Yage Letters Redux (2006). Following the publication of the latter in December 2007, Ohio State University Press released ''Everything Lost: The Latin American Journals of William S. Burroughs'' also edited by Harris, the book contains transcriptions of journal entries made by Burroughs during the time of composing ''Queer'' and ''The Yage Letters'', with cover art and review information. There followed "restored text" versions of some of Burroughs' best known novels The Soft Machine, The Ticket that Exploded and Nova Express
(styled "the Cut Up Trilogy" officially here for the first time) from Penguin in 2014, and of Burroughs' more obscure collaborative poetic experiments of 1960 ''Minutes to Go: Redux'' & ''The Exterminator: Redux'' by Moloko Press in 2020. These books, originally pamphlets, are bulked out to three times their original size and the "trilogy" is complete with the completely new ''BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS'' an allied experimental collaboration, composited from unpublished drafts and recordings of the same period.
Literary style and periods
Burroughs' major works can be divided into four different periods. The dates refer to the time of writing, not publication, which in some cases was not until decades later:
;Early work (early 1950s): ''Junkie
Junkie is a pejorative usually referring to a person with an addiction.
Entertainment and media
* ''Junkie'' (novel), a novel by William S. Burroughs
* "Junkie" (song), 2013 song by Medina featuring Svenstrup & Vendelboe
* ''The Junkies'', a ...
'', ''Queer
''Queer'' is an umbrella term for people who are not heterosexual or cisgender. Originally meaning or , ''queer'' came to be used pejoratively against those with same-sex desires or relationships in the late 19th century. Beginning in the lat ...
'' and '' The Yage Letters'' are relatively straightforward linear narratives, written in and about Burroughs' time in Mexico City and South America.
;The cut-up period (mid-1950s to mid-1960s): Although published before Burroughs discovered the cut-up technique
The cut-up technique (or ''découpé'' in French) is an aleatory literary technique in which a written text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. The concept can be traced to the Dadaists of the 1920s, but it was developed and popularized ...
, '' Naked Lunch'' is a fragmentary collection of "routines" from ''The Word Hoard'' – manuscripts written in Tangier, Paris, London, as well as of other texts written in South America such as "The Composite City", blending into the Cut-up technique, cut-up and fold-in fiction also partly drawn from ''The Word Hoard'': ''The Soft Machine
''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things already mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the m ...
'', ''Nova Express
''Nova Express'' is a 1964 novel by American author William S. Burroughs. It was written using the 'fold-in' method, a version of the cut-up method, developed by Burroughs with Brion Gysin, of enfolding snippets of different texts into the novel ...
'', ''The Ticket That Exploded
''The Ticket That Exploded'' is a 1962 novel by American author William S. Burroughs, published by Olympia Press and later by Grove Press in 1967. Together with '' The Soft Machine'' and ''Nova Express'' it is part of a trilogy, referred to as ' ...
'', also referred to as " The Nova Trilogy" or "The Cut-Up Trilogy", self-described by Burroughs as an attempt to create "a mythology for the space age". '' Interzone'' also derives from the mid-1950s.
;Experiment and subversion (mid-1960s to mid-1970s): This period saw Burroughs continue experimental writing with increased political content and branching into multimedia such as film and sound recording. Perhaps the defining and most important of which works is ''The Third Mind'' (with Brion Gysin) announced in 1966 and not published until the late '70s. The only major novels written in this period are ''The Wild Boys (novel), The Wild Boys'', and ''Port of Saints'' (republished in a different rewritten form in 1980, in the style Burroughs would adopt at that time). However he also wrote dozens of published articles, short stories, scrap books and other works, several in collaboration with Brion Gysin. The major anthologies representing work from this period are ''The Burroughs File'', ''The Adding Machine: Collected Essays, The Adding Machine'' and ''Exterminator!''.
;The ''Red Night'' trilogy (mid-1970s to mid-1980s): The books ''Cities of the Red Night'', ''The Place of Dead Roads'' and ''The Western Lands'' came from Burroughs in a final, mature stage, creating a complete mythology.
Burroughs also produced numerous essays and a large body of autobiographical material, including a book with a detailed account of his own dreams (''My Education: A Book of Dreams'').
Reaction to critics and view on criticism
Several literary criticism, 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 "A Review of the Reviewers", Burroughs answers his critics in this way:
Burroughs clearly indicates here that he prefers to be evaluated against such criteria over being reviewed based on the reviewer's personal reactions to a certain book. Always a contradictory figure, Burroughs nevertheless criticized Anatole Broyard for reading authorial intent into his works where there is none, which sets him at odds both with New Criticism and the old school as represented by Matthew Arnold.
Photography
Burroughs used photography extensively throughout his career, both as a recording medium in planning his writings, and as a significant dimension of his own artistic practice, in which photographs and other images feature as significant elements in cut-ups. With Ian Sommerville, he experimented with photography's potential as a form of memory-device, photographing and rephotographing his own pictures in increasingly complex time-image arrangements.
Legacy
Burroughs is often called one of the greatest and most influential writers of the 20th century, most notably by Norman Mailer
Nachem Malech Mailer (January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007), known by his pen name Norman Kingsley Mailer, was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, activist, filmmaker and actor. In a career spanning over six decades, Mailer ...
whose quote on Burroughs, "The only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius", appears on many Burroughs publications. Others consider his concepts and attitude more influential than his prose. Prominent admirers of Burroughs' work have included British critic and biographer Peter Ackroyd, the Music journalism, rock critic Lester Bangs, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the authors J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Jean Genet, William Gibson, Alan Moore, Kathy Acker and Ken Kesey. Burroughs had an influence on the German writer Carl Weissner, who in addition to being his German translator was a novelist in his own right and frequently wrote cut-up texts in a manner reminiscent of Burroughs.
Burroughs continues to be named as an influence by contemporary writers of fiction. Both the New Wave (science fiction), New Wave and, especially, the cyberpunk schools of science fiction are indebted to him. Admirers from the late 1970s – early 1980s milieu of this subgenre include William Gibson and John Shirley, to name only two. First published in 1982, the British Slipstream (genre), slipstream fiction magazine ''Interzone (magazine), Interzone'' (which later evolved into a more traditional science fiction magazine) paid tribute to him with its choice of name. He is also cited as a major influence by musicians Roger Waters, David Bowie, Patti Smith, Genesis P-Orridge, Ian Curtis, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, John Zorn, Tom Waits, Gary Numan and Kurt Cobain.
In the film William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, Ira Silverberg commented on Burroughs' development as a writer:
Drugs, homosexuality, and death, common among Burroughs' themes, have been 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 Allen Ginsberg, Ginsberg, [Burroughs] helped make homosexuality seem cool and highbrow, providing gay liberation with a delicious edge". Splatterpunk writer Poppy Z. Brite has frequently referenced this aspect of Burroughs' work. Burroughs' writing continues to be referenced years after his death; for example, a November 2004 episode of the TV series ''CSI: Crime Scene Investigation'' 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 ''Repo Man (film), Repo Man,'' made during Burroughs' life-time, in which both Dr. Benway and Mr. Lee (a Burroughs pen name) are paged.
Burroughs had an impact on twentieth-century esotericism and occultism as well, most notably through disciples like Peter Lamborn Wilson and Genesis P-Orridge. Burroughs is also cited by Robert Anton Wilson as the first person to notice the "23 Enigma":
Some research suggests that Burroughs is arguably the progenitor of the 2012 phenomenon, a belief of New Age Mayanism that an apocalyptic shift in human consciousness would occur at the end of the Mayan Long Count calendar in 2012. Although never directly focusing on the year 2012 himself, Burroughs had an influence on early 2012 proponents such as Terence McKenna and Jose Arguelles, Jose Argüelles, and as well had written about an apocalyptic shift of human consciousness at the end of the Long Count as early as 1960's ''The Exterminator''.
Bibliography
Footnotes
References
Sources
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Further reading
Published materials
* Allmer, Patricia and John Sears (ed.) ''Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs'', London: Prestel and The Photographers' Gallery, 2014.
* Charters, Ann (ed.). ''The Portable Beat Reader''. New York: Penguin Books, 1992. (hc); (pbk).
* Gilmore, John. ''Laid Bare: A Memoir of Wrecked Lives and the Hollywood Death Trip.'' Searching for Rimbaud. Amok Books, 1997.
* Harris, Oliver. ''William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination''. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003.
* Johnson, Robert Earl. ''The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: Beats in South Texas''. Texas A&M University Press, 2006.
* Kashner, Sam, ''When I Was Cool, My Life at the Jack Kerouac School''. New York: HarperCollins Perennial, 2005.
* Miles, Barry. ''William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible: A Portrait''. New York: Hyperion, 1993.
* Sargeant, Jack. ''Naked Lens: Beat Cinema''. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2008 [1997] [2001].
* Schneiderman, Davis and Philip Walsh. ''Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization''. London: Pluto Press, 2004.
* Stevens, Mathew Levi. ''The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs''. Mandrake of Oxford, 2014.
* Stevens, Michael. ''The Road to Interzone: Reading William S. Burroughs Reading''. Suicide Press, Archer City, Texas, 2009.
* Weidner, Chad. ''The Green Ghost: William Burroughs and the Ecological Mind''. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016.
* Wills, David S. ''Scientologist! William S. Burroughs and the Weird Cult''. Beatdom Books, London, 2013.
*Bernhard Valentinitsch,Hoch hinauf strebend und doch geerdet - über den Schriftsteller Harald Sommer,den steirischen William S. Burroughs.In:Denken und Glauben.Nr.199.Graz 2021.Nr.199,p.22-24.
Archival sources
William S. Burroughs papers
(17 linear feet – 94 boxes) are held by the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.
William Seward Burroughs Papers, 1957–1976
(2 linear feet) are held in the Columbia University Libraries.
William S. Burroughs Papers, SPEC.CMS.40
(ca. 1945-ca. 1984, 55 boxes plus additions) are held in the Ohio State University libraries.
William S. Burroughs Papers, SPEC.CMS.85
(ca. 1945-ca. 1984, 6 boxes) are held in the Ohio State University libraries.
William S. Burroughs Papers, SPEC.CMS.87
(ca. 1945-ca. 1984, 58 boxes) are held in the Ohio State University libraries.
William S. Burroughs Papers, SPEC.CMS.90
(ca. 1945-ca. 1984, 29 boxes) are held in the Ohio State University libraries.
William S. Burroughs collection
(3 linear feet) are held in the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University.
William S. Burroughs Collection, MS 63
and James Grauerholz Collection of William S. Burroughs, MS 319, are held at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas
edited by postmodern American scholar Michael Gurnow, hosted on the servers of Southeast Missouri State University from 2000 to 2012.
Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs, The Photographers' Gallery exhibition website.
William S. Burroughs and Photography Lecture Series
External links
*
*
*
*William S. Burroughs audio documentary narrated by Iggy Po
William S. Burroughs Internet Database
at Southeast Missouri State University
International festivities for 50th anniversary
of ''Naked Lunch''
A gallery of Burroughs book cover designs
Interview by George Laughead, August 2007
Interview
excerpt from RE/Search
Allen Ginsberg & William S. Burroughs, Last Public Appearance
November 2, 1996, Lawrence, KS
European Beat Studies Network
''William S. Burroughs: A Man Within''
site for Independent Lens on PBS
*
William S. Burroughs interviewed by Allen Ginsberg
March 1992 in Lawrence, Kansas, from ''Sensitive Skin (magazine), Sensitive Skin'' magazine No. 8, published April 2012
Anything but Routine: A Selectively Annotated Bibliography of William S. Burroughs v 2.0
by Brian E.C. Schottlaender, UC San Diego, 2010
Burroughs 101
by This American Life, January 30, 2015
A finding aid to the William Burroughs and Brion Gysin writings, 1963–1973, 1997 in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
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