William S. Burroughs |
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Born in St Louis in 1914 into the family of a wealthy industrialist, William Seward Burroughs became addicted to drugs (primarily opiates) in 1944, an experience that became central to both his work and public persona. Despite graduating from Harvard in 1936 with a degree in English Literature, Burroughs spent a number of his early years working in a variety of often unpleasant positions, including those of cockroach exterminator, factory worker and advertising copywriter. In 1945 he married Joan Vollmer, with whom he shared an interest in firearms. This interest lead to her accidental death at Burroughs' hands in Mexico in 1949; he was released after three days and a judicial warning. In 1954, after a period spent searching for the drug yage in South America, Burroughs settled in Tangier. The year before he had published Junky: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict under the pseudonym William Lee, and it was in Tangier that Burroughs' addiction grew, until, the family remittances he had been living on having run out, he took himself and what money he had left to London, where, in 1959, he underwent successful treatment for his addiction. Soon after this he began work on one of his most famous (or infamous, depending on which side of the critical and moral divide it is observed from) work, The Naked Lunch, which was published that same year. This period also saw the publication of The Soft Machine (1961, final version 1968), The Ticket That Exploded (1962) and Nova Express (1964). In 1965, after living for a time in Paris, he moved to London, remained there for eight years, then to New York and, a decade later, to Lawrence, Kansas, where he lived and worked until his death in 1997.
Burroughs' writing is an unusual mixture of autobiography, satire, grotesquerie and (in his later works) genre fiction (he included elements of westerns, science fiction and detective stories), and technical experimentation, notably the 'cut-up, fold-in' technique, a method of writing that relied on a near-random assembling of the text to generate the finished work. He has been claimed as both the father of the 'Beats' and (with Kerouac and Ginsburg) as one of the 'big three' of that movement; what is certain is that the influence of his work and methods has spread far from the literary world to both music and film. His later work was more structured than his early books, and so is, arguably, less exciting. Even so books such as Queer (1985) and Interzone (1989) have had considerable influence.
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