William S. Burroughs

American writer and visual artist

Date of Birth	:	05 Feb, 1914
Date of Death	:	02 Aug, 1997
Place of Birth	:	St. Louis, Missouri, United States
Profession	:	American Writer, Visual Artist
Nationality	:	American

William Seward Burroughs was an American writer and visual artist. He is widely considered an early figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern writer who influenced popular culture and literature. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories, and four collections of essays, and Five books of his interviews and correspondence have been published; He was initially known as William Lee. He has collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, made numerous film appearances, 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 the grandson of inventor William Seward Burroughs I, who founded the Burroughs Corporation, and the nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee. Burroughs attended Harvard University, majored in English, studied anthropology as a graduate student, and attended medical school in Vienna. In 1942, Burroughs enlisted in the US Army to serve during World War II. After being rejected by the Office of Strategic Services and the Navy, he developed a heroin addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, starting initially with morphine. In 1943, while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Their mutual influence became the foundation of the Beat Generation, which later had a defining influence on the counterculture of the 1960s. Burroughs had success with his confessional debut novel, Junkie (1953), but is perhaps best known for his third novel, Naked Lunch (1959). Naked Lunch became the subject of the latest major literary censorship in the United States after the US publisher, Grove Press, was sued for violating Massachusetts obscenity laws.

Burroughs murdered his second wife Joan Vollmer in Mexico City in 1951. Burroughs initially claimed he shot Vollmer while drunk trying to perform a "William Tell" stunt. He later told investigators he was showing the pistol to friends when it fell and hit the table, firing the shot that killed Vollmer. After Burroughs returned to the United States, he was convicted of manslaughter in absentia and received a two-year suspended sentence.

Although heavily experimental and featuring unreliable narrators, much of Burroughs' work is semi-autobiographical, and often drew from his experiences as a heroin addict. He lived variously in Mexico City, London, Paris, and the International Zone of Tangier near Morocco, and traveled to the Amazon rainforest, locations that feature in many of his novels and stories. Along with Brian Gysin, Burroughs popularized the cut-up, a short-lived literary technique that featured heavily in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961–1964). Burroughs' work also frequently features mystical, espionage, or otherwise magical themes, which were a constant preoccupation for Burroughs, both in fiction and nonfiction.

In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1984, he was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. Jack Kerouac called Burroughs "the greatest satirist since Jonathan Swift"; he owed this reputation to his "lifelong dismay" of the moral, political, and economic systems of modern American society, often expressed in darkly humorous satire. is . J.G. Ballard considered Burroughs "the most important writer to emerge since World War II", while Norman Mailer declared him "the only American writer who could conceivably be gifted".

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 in St. Louis, Missouri. His grandfather, William Seward Burroughs I, founded the Burroughs Adding Machine company, which evolved into the Burroughs Corporation. Burroughs' mother was Laura Hammond Lee Burroughs, whose brother, Ivy Lee, 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, 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 and the occult – 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 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: 44 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.

Europe

After Burroughs graduated from Harvard, his formal education ended, except for brief flirtations with graduate study of anthropology at Columbia and medicine in Vienna, Austria. He traveled to Europe and became involved in Austrian and Hungarian Weimar-era LGBT culture; 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 government. The two were never romantically involved, but Burroughs married her, in Croatia, 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.: 65–68 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 brought the United States into World War II. But when he was classified as a 1-A infantry, 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. When two of his friends from St. Louis – University of Chicago student Lucien Carr and his admirer, David Kammerer – left for New York City, Burroughs followed.

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 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.

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 – to disrupt language via methods such as the cut-up technique, 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.

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, 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, 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, which he wrote at the urging of Allen Ginsberg, who was instrumental in getting the work published as a cheap mass-market paperback. Ace Books 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, and in New York City with Allen Ginsberg. When Ginsberg refused his romantic advances, Burroughs went to Rome to meet Alan Ansen on a vacation financed from his parents' continuing support. He found Rome and Ansen's company dreary and, inspired by Paul Bowles' fiction, he decided to head for the Tangier International Zone, : 232–234 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 were published until 1989 when Interzone, a collection of short stories, was published. Under the strong influence of a marijuana confection known as majoun and a German-made opioid 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.

London year

Burroughs left Paris for London in 1960 to visit Dr. Dent, a well-known English medical doctor who led a renowned painless heroin withdrawal treatment using the drug apomorphine. Dent's apomorphine cure was also used to treat alcoholism, although it was held by many to be nothing more than straightforward aversion therapy. Burroughs, however, was convinced. After his first cure, he wrote a detailed eulogy 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 has been added to many editions of Naked Lunch.

Although he eventually relapsed, Burroughs ended up working out of London for six years, returning to the United States on several occasions, including once after being convicted of petty Burroughs prescription fraud, including taking his son to the Lexington narcotics farm and prison. Florida. In the "Afterword" of his son's previously published collection of two novels, Speed and Kentucky Ham, Burroughs wrote that he thought he had a "little habit" and left London quickly without any drugs because he suspected US customs would search him too thoroughly. . Upon arrival, she claims that she went through the most stressful two months of opium withdrawal while seeing her son through his trial and sentencing, traveling with Billy from Miami to Lexington, Kentucky to make sure her son entered the hospital where she once volunteered. spent Before admission, Burroughs went to St. Louis, Missouri, to receive a large advance from Playboy to write an article about his return to St. Louis, which was eventually published in the Paris Review, when Burroughs refused to change the style for Playboy's publishers. In 1968 Burroughs joined Gene Genet, John Sack, and Terry Southern to cover the 1968 Democratic National Convention for Esquire magazine. Southern and Burroughs, who first met in London, would remain lifelong friends and associates. In 1972, Burroughs and Southern American game-show producer Chuck Barris tried unsuccessfully to adapt Naked Lunch for the screen.

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 Anthony Balch and lived with a young hustler named John Brady who constantly brought young women home despite Burroughs' protests. Amid 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 (1971).