William Seward Burroughs II (born February 5, 1914; died August 2, 1997) was an American writer and visual artist. He is widely recognized as an important member of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced both underground and mainstream culture and literature. Much of Burroughs’s work is highly experimental and includes stories told by characters who may not be trustworthy. His writing is also based on his own life and often reflects his experiences with drug use and the places he lived. He worked with Brion Gysin to develop the cut-up technique, a method of rearranging text randomly. His writing often includes themes related to magic, the supernatural, or spiritual ideas, which were also important in his personal life.
Burroughs was born into a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri. He attended Harvard University, where he studied English and later anthropology. He also studied medicine in Vienna. In 1942, he joined the U.S. Army during World War II. After being rejected by the Office of Strategic Services and the Navy, he began using drugs, starting with morphine and later developing a long-term addiction to heroin. In 1943, he met Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in New York City. Their friendship helped shape the Beat Generation, which later influenced the 1960s counterculture movement.
Burroughs gained recognition with his first novel, Junkie (1953), which he wrote under the name William Lee. He had mostly finished the book before accidentally killing his second wife, Joan Vollmer, in Mexico City in 1951. He was found guilty of manslaughter in absentia and received a two-year suspended sentence. His third novel, Naked Lunch (1959), led to a major legal case in the United States after its publisher was sued for breaking a Massachusetts law against obscenity. He also wrote The Nova Trilogy (1961–1964), which used the cut-up technique, and The Red Night Trilogy: Cities of the Red Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1983), and The Western Lands (1987).
In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1984, he was honored with the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. Jack Kerouac called Burroughs "the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift," noting his lifelong criticism of modern American society through a humorous and critical style. J. G. Ballard described Burroughs as "the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War," while Norman Mailer called him "the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius." Burroughs also worked with musicians, appeared in films, and created thousands of visual artworks, including his famous "shotgun art."
Early life and education
William S. Burroughs was born in 1914. He was 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 had important English heritage and lived in St. Louis, Missouri. His grandfather, William Seward Burroughs I, started the Burroughs Adding Machine company, which later became the Burroughs Corporation. His mother, Laura Hammon Lee Burroughs, had a brother named Ivy Lee, who was a pioneer in advertising and later worked for the Rockefeller family. His father owned an antiques and gift shop called Cobblestone Gardens in St. Louis and later in Palm Beach, Florida, after the family moved. Burroughs later wrote that he grew up in a family where showing affection was considered embarrassing.
As a child, Burroughs became interested in magic and mystical topics, which later appeared in his writing. He once saw a green reindeer in the woods, which he believed was a totem animal, and saw ghostly gray figures playing in his bedroom.
Burroughs lived on Pershing Avenue (now Pershing Place) in St. Louis’s Central West End. He attended John Burroughs School in St. Louis, where his first published essay, "Personal Magnetism," about telepathic mind-control, appeared in the John Burroughs Review in 1929. He later attended the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, which was difficult for him. The school was for wealthy boys who were expected to become strong and healthy. Burroughs wrote about having romantic feelings for another boy in his journals, but later destroyed them because he felt ashamed. He kept his sexual orientation a secret from his family until adulthood. Some say he was expelled from the school after taking a drug with a classmate, but he claimed he left on his own after persuading his family to let him stay in St. Louis during a vacation.
Burroughs finished high school at Taylor School in Clayton, Missouri, and left home in 1932 to study arts at Harvard University, where he lived in Adams House. During summers, he worked as a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, covering police events. He disliked the job and refused to report on some stories, like the death of a child. He lost his virginity in a brothel in East St. Louis, Illinois, that summer. While at Harvard, he visited New York City and met members of the gay community, including Richard Stern, a wealthy friend from Kansas City. They traveled to New York in a reckless way, and once, Stern frightened Burroughs so badly that he asked to leave the car.
Burroughs graduated from Harvard in 1936. According to Ted Morgan’s Literary Outlaw, his parents gave him $200 a month from the earnings of Cobblestone Gardens, which was a large amount of money at the time. This money allowed him to live freely and avoid working for the next 25 years.
Burroughs’s parents sold the rights to his grandfather’s invention and did not own any part of the Burroughs Corporation. Shortly before the 1929 stock market crash, they sold their shares for $200,000 (about $3.8 million today).
After graduating from Harvard, Burroughs did not continue formal education, except for brief studies in anthropology at Columbia University and medicine in Vienna, Austria. He traveled to Europe and became involved in gay communities in Austria and Hungary during the Weimar era. He met young men in Vienna and moved in circles of exiles, homosexuals, and runaways. There, he met Ilse Klapper, a German Jewish woman fleeing Nazi Germany. Though they were not romantically involved, Burroughs married her in Croatia to help her get a visa to the United States. She later moved to New York City and divorced him, but they stayed friends.
After returning to the United States, Burroughs held many uninteresting jobs. In 1939, his mental health became a concern after he cut off the last joint of his left little finger to impress someone he admired. This event later appeared in his early fiction as the short story The Finger.
Burroughs joined the U.S. Army in 1942, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He was classified as a 1-A infantryman, not an officer, which made him sad. His mother arranged for him to be released from the army due to his mental health, based on a recommendation from a family friend who was a neurologist. Burroughs waited five months in limbo at Jefferson Barracks near St. Louis before being discharged. During this time, he met a soldier from Chicago also waiting for release. After his discharge, he moved to Chicago and held jobs, including one as an exterminator. When two friends from St. Louis—Lucien Carr, a University of Chicago student, and David Kammerer, who had sexually assaulted him—moved to New York City, Burroughs followed them.
Addiction and Joan Vollmer
In 1945, Burroughs began living with Joan Vollmer Adams in an apartment shared with Jack Kerouac and Edie Parker, Kerouac's first wife. Vollmer Adams was married to a soldier and had a young daughter named Julie Adams.
Burroughs and Kerouac faced legal problems for not reporting a murder involving Lucien Carr, who had killed David Kammerer during a confrontation allegedly over Kammerer's unwanted advances. This event inspired Burroughs and Kerouac to work together on a novel titled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, completed in 1945. The two young writers could not get the book published during their lifetimes, but the manuscript was published in November 2008 by Grove Press and Penguin Books.
During this time, Burroughs began using morphine and became addicted. He sold heroin in Greenwich Village to support his habit. Vollmer also became an addict, but to Benzedrine, an amphetamine sold over the counter at that time. Because of her addiction and social circle, her husband divorced her after returning from the war. With encouragement from Allen Ginsberg and possibly Kerouac, Burroughs became emotionally connected to Vollmer and moved in with her and her daughter by summer 1945. In spring 1946, Burroughs was arrested for forging a narcotics prescription. Vollmer asked her psychiatrist, Lewis Wolberg, to sign a surety bond for Burroughs's release. As part of his release, Burroughs returned to St. Louis under his parents' care, then left for Mexico to get a divorce from Ilse Klapper. Meanwhile, Vollmer's addiction led to a temporary mental health crisis, resulting in her admission to Bellevue Hospital, which endangered the custody of her child. Upon hearing this, Burroughs returned to New York City to help her, asking her to marry him. Their marriage was never formalized, but she lived as his common-law wife. In 2025, it was discovered that Burroughs married a Mexican woman named María Lucrecia Barquera on November 23, 1949, likely for immigration reasons. He kept this secret for the rest of his life.
They returned to St. Louis to visit Burroughs's parents and then moved with her daughter to Texas. Vollmer soon became pregnant with Burroughs's child. Their son, William S. Burroughs Jr., was born in 1947. The family moved briefly to New Orleans in 1948.
In New Orleans, police stopped Burroughs's car one evening. They found an unregistered handgun belonging to him and a letter from Ginsberg that included details about the sale of marijuana. The police searched Burroughs's home, where they discovered his drugs and several firearms. Burroughs fled to Mexico to avoid possible detention in Louisiana's Angola State Prison. Vollmer and their children followed him. Burroughs planned to stay in Mexico for at least five years, the length of his legal time limit. Burroughs also attended classes at Mexico City College in 1950, studying Spanish, Mesoamerican manuscripts (codices), and the Mayan language with R. H. Barlow.
Their life in Mexico was unhappy. Without heroin and suffering from Benzedrine abuse, Burroughs began pursuing other men as his sexual desire returned, while Vollmer, feeling abandoned, drank heavily and mocked Burroughs openly.
One night, while drinking with friends at a party above the 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 evidence they had performed such an action before. Vollmer, who was also drinking heavily and undergoing amphetamine withdrawal, allegedly agreed by placing a highball glass on her head. Burroughs shot Vollmer in the head, killing her almost immediately.
Soon after the incident, Burroughs changed his story, claiming 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 him on bail while awaiting 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 to jail in Mexico City every Monday morning while his prominent Mexican attorney worked to resolve the case. According to James Grauerholz, two witnesses agreed to testify that the gun had fired accidentally while Burroughs was checking if it was loaded, with ballistics experts bribed to support this story. Nevertheless, the trial was delayed repeatedly, and Burroughs began writing what would eventually become the short novel Queer while waiting for his trial. Upon Burroughs's attorney fleeing Mexico due to 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 received a two-year suspended sentence.
Although Burroughs was writing before his murder of Joan Vollmer, this event marked him and, biographers argue, his work for the rest of his life. Vollmer's death also affected Allen Ginsberg, who wrote about 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 suggested Vollmer may have been suicidal in the weeks before her death, which might have influenced her willingness to participate in the risky William Tell stunt.
After leaving Mexico, Burroughs traveled through South America for several months, seeking a drug called yagé, which promised telepathic abilities. A book 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 fictionalized from Burroughs's notes.
Beginning of literary career
Burroughs said that Vollmer's death was an important event in his life. It caused him to write, as it made him face the danger of being taken over by a harmful force he called "the Ugly Spirit." He wrote: "I believe I would never have become a writer if not for Joan's death. This event has greatly influenced my writing. I live with the fear of being controlled and the need to escape it. Joan's death made me face the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and started a lifelong struggle. My only way out was to write."
Burroughs meant "possession" literally, not as a psychological idea. He said, "My idea of possession is more like the medieval belief than modern explanations. I mean a real, controlling force." His writing was a form of "sorcery," using methods like the cut-up technique to change language and protect himself from being controlled. Later, he described the Ugly Spirit as "controlling and greedy evil. Ugly evil. The ugly American." He took part in a ceremony to get rid of the Ugly Spirit.
Oliver Harris questioned if Vollmer's death really started Burroughs's writing, pointing out that Burroughs's difficult relationship with a fictional character named Eugene Allerton, based on a real person, was also important. However, Burroughs had already begun writing in 1945. He and Kerouac wrote a mystery novel called And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, loosely based on real events. Burroughs later said it was not a strong work. An excerpt was finally published in Word Virus, a book of Burroughs's writings published after his death in 1997. The full novel was published by Grove Press in 2008.
Before killing Vollmer, Burroughs had mostly finished his first novel, Junkie, which Allen Ginsberg helped him write and publish. Ace Books published it in 1953 under the name William Lee, retitling it Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict. It was later republished as Junkie and Junky.
In 1953, Burroughs had no clear direction. Legal problems kept him from living in places he wanted. He stayed with his parents in Florida and with Ginsberg in New York. When Ginsberg refused his romantic advances, Burroughs went to Rome with financial help from his parents. He found Rome and his friend Alan Ansen boring, and inspired by Paul Bowles's stories, he went to Tangier. There, he rented a room and wrote a large body of work he called Interzone.
Burroughs felt Tangier was the right place for him. It had drugs and financial support from his family. He stayed there from 1954 to 1958, working on Naked Lunch and writing about Tangier. He sent these writings to Ginsberg, his literary agent, but they were not published until 1959, when Interzone was released. Influenced by a drug called majoun and an opioid called Eukodol, Burroughs focused on writing. Ginsberg and Kerouac, who visited Tangier in 1957, helped him type, edit, and arrange the stories into Naked Lunch.
During this time, Burroughs had a sexual relationship with a teenage boy named Kiki, which ended when Kiki was murdered in 1957.
Unlike Junkie and Queer, Naked Lunch used a nonlinear style. After its publication, Burroughs learned about the cut-up technique from Brion Gysin in Paris in 1959. He began cutting up phrases and words to create new sentences. Gysin and Burroughs became close friends, sharing an interest in art and the cut-up method. Scenes were put together without much concern for story order.
Excerpts from Naked Lunch were first published in the U.S. in 1958. City Lights Books and Olympia Press initially rejected the book. However, Ginsberg got excerpts published in Black Mountain Review and Chicago Review in 1958. Irving Rosenthal, an editor, promised to publish more but was fired after a newspaper called an excerpt obscene. Rosenthal later published more in his journal Big Table No. 1, but the U.S. Postmaster General blocked mailing the journal due to obscenity laws. John Ciardi reviewed the work positively, leading Ginsberg to praise the review. This controversy made *N
Return to United States
In 1974, Allen Ginsberg helped William S. Burroughs get a job teaching creative writing at the City College of New York. Burroughs stopped using heroin and moved to New York. He found an apartment called "The Bunker" on the Lower East Side at 222 Bowery. The building was once a YMCA gym with lockers and shared showers. Because of New York City's rent control rules, the rent was very low—about $400 a month until 1981, when the rules changed and the rent doubled. Burroughs disliked teaching and only lasted one semester as a professor. He found the students uninterested and not creative. Even though he needed money, he refused a teaching job at the University at Buffalo for $15,000 a semester. He said teaching was "a lesson in never again."
James Grauerholz, a young bookseller and fan of the Beat Generation, helped Burroughs by suggesting reading tours. Grauerholz had experience managing rock bands in Kansas and arranged tours that supported Burroughs for two decades. These tours helped raise Burroughs's public profile and led to new publishing contracts. Through Grauerholz, Burroughs became a monthly writer for the magazine Crawdaddy, where he interviewed Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page in 1975.
Burroughs moved back to the United States permanently in 1976. He met New York artists like Andy Warhol, John Giorno, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and Susan Sontag, often hosting them at the Bunker. He also visited places like CBGB to watch Patti Smith perform. In early 1977, Burroughs worked with Southern and Dennis Hopper to adapt his book Junky into a movie. The film was planned to include Burroughs himself, but it faced financial problems and disagreements between Hopper and Burroughs.
In 1976, Burroughs appeared in a documentary called Underground & Emigrants made by Rosa von Praunheim in New York.
In 1978, a multimedia event called the Nova Convention was organized by Columbia professor Sylvère Lotringer, John Giorno, and James Grauerholz. It celebrated Burroughs's work and took place in New York from November 30 to December 2. The event included readings by Southern, Ginsberg, Smith, and Frank Zappa (who replaced Keith Richards, who was in legal trouble), as well as panel discussions with Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson. Concerts by The B-52's, Suicide, Philip Glass, and Debbie Harry and Chris Stein were also part of the event.
In 1976, Burroughs was in Boulder, Colorado, at Ginsberg's Buddhist poetry school when his son, William S. "Billy" Burroughs Jr., began vomiting blood. Burroughs had not seen Billy in over a year and was shocked by his condition. Billy had written two novels in the 1970s and was called a "second generation beat writer" by critics. However, his marriage to a teenage waitress had ended, and he struggled with alcoholism and long periods of isolation. Billy was diagnosed with severe liver disease, requiring a rare liver transplant. The University of Colorado Medical Center, known for pioneering transplant work by Dr. Thomas Starzl, performed the surgery. Billy survived the operation, which had only a 30% chance of success. Burroughs spent time in Colorado helping Billy with follow-up surgeries and health issues. His relationship with Billy was described as distant and lacking warmth. Allen Ginsberg supported both Burroughs and his son during Billy's recovery.
While in London, Burroughs began writing the first novel of a trilogy: Cities of the Red Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1983), and The Western Lands (1987). Grauerholz helped edit Cities of the Red Night after it was rejected by Burroughs's longtime editor, Dick Seaver, for being too disjointed. The novel was written as a straight story but later rearranged into a more random structure, leaving readers to piece together the plot. This style was different from Burroughs's earlier "cut-up" method, which was accidental. The novel was published in a non-linear form but with fewer breaks. Reviews of Cities of the Red Night were mixed. Some critics, like Anthony Burgess, criticized the book for repetitive and disturbing content, while others, like J.G. Ballard, believed Burroughs was creating a new literary style.
In 1981, Billy Burroughs died in Florida. He had stopped speaking to his father years earlier and even wrote an article in Esquire claiming his father had poisoned his life and that he was molested by one of Burroughs's friends in Tangier. Billy's liver transplant had not cured his alcohol addiction, and he suffered serious health problems after stopping his medication. He was found near a Florida highway by a stranger and died shortly after. Burroughs was in New York when he learned of Billy's death from Allen Ginsberg.
By 1979, Burroughs had returned to heroin addiction. Cheap heroin was easily available on the Lower East Side, and well-meaning admirers who visited the Bunker sometimes gave him drugs. Although Burroughs had periods without heroin, he remained addicted until his death. James Grauerholz, who managed Burroughs's reading tours in the 1980s and 1990s, noted that part of his job involved dealing with local drug dealers to secure Burroughs's supply.
In 1981, Burroughs moved to Lawrence, Kansas, and lived at 1927 Learnard Avenue for the rest of his life. He told a Wichita Eagle reporter he liked Kansas because it was safer and cheaper, and he could enjoy outdoor activities like fishing and hunting. In 1984, Burroughs signed a seven-book deal with Viking Press after working with literary agent Andrew Wylie. The deal included the rights to his unpublished 1952 novel Queer. With the money, he bought a small bungalow for $29,000. He was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983 after Allen Ginsberg's efforts. Burroughs attended the induction ceremony in May 1983. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a writer, made a comment at the event.
Death
Burroughs died on August 2, 1997, at the age of 83, in Lawrence, Kansas, due to complications from a heart attack he had the day before. He was buried in the family burial plot in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri. His grave marker includes his full name and the inscription "American Writer." His burial site is located to the right of the white stone monument dedicated to William Seward Burroughs I (1857–1898).
Posthumous works
Since 1997, many collections of Burroughs's work have been published after his death. A few months after he passed away, a book called Word Virus was released. This book includes writings from all the years of Burroughs's career. According to the book's introduction, Burroughs approved the contents before he died. In addition to pieces that had already been published, Word Virus also included a fragment of a novel called And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, which Burroughs and Kerouac wrote together. The full version of this novel was published for the first time in November 2008.
In 2000, a book titled Last Words was published. It contains journal entries Burroughs wrote during the last months of his life. A memoir by Burroughs called Evil River was first planned for release in 2005. Later, it was scheduled for 2007, with an ISBN number (ISBN 0-670-81351-6). However, the book has not yet been published.
In recent years, new or expanded editions of many of Burroughs's works have been released. These editions are called "Restored Text" or "Redux" versions. They include extra material, essays, or content that was removed from earlier editions. The first of these was a 2003 edition of Naked Lunch by Barry Miles and James Grauerholz. Later, Oliver Harris created new versions of three trilogies of Burroughs's writings. These include Junky: the definitive text of "Junk" (2003), Queer: 25th-Anniversary Edition (2010), and The Yage Letters Redux (2006). After The Yage Letters Redux was published in December 2007, Ohio State University Press released Everything Lost: The Latin American Journals of William S. Burroughs, edited by Harris. This book includes transcriptions of journal entries Burroughs wrote while working on Queer and The Yage Letters. It also features cover art and review information.
Later, "restored text" versions of some of Burroughs's most famous novels were published. These include The Soft Machine, The Ticket that Exploded, and Nova Express by Penguin in 2014. These books are now called "the Cut Up Trilogy" for the first time. Additionally, Moloko Press published "restored text" versions of Burroughs's less well-known collaborative poems, 1960 Minutes to Go: Redux and The Exterminator: Redux, in 2020. These books were originally small pamphlets but have been expanded to three times their original size. The "trilogy" is completed with a new work called BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS, which Harris created by combining unpublished drafts and recordings from the same period.
Views
Burroughs had a long interest in magic and the occult, which began in his childhood. He believed throughout his life that the world is a "magical universe." He explained:
In a magical universe, nothing happens by chance. Every event occurs because someone wants it to happen. Science teaches that the will cannot influence the outside world, but Burroughs disagreed. He believed this idea was incorrect, similar to old religious beliefs. He thought the opposite: that meeting someone in the street was meaningful. Among early people, they believed being bitten by a snake was a form of murder. Burroughs agreed with this view.
In the 1970s, he said:
The word "magic" can cause confusion, so I will clarify what I mean. Magic assumes that "will" is the main force in the universe. This means nothing happens unless someone or something wants it to happen. To me, this idea is obvious. From a magical perspective, no death, illness, misfortune, accident, war, or riot is accidental. There are no accidents in the world of magic.
Burroughs did not just think about magic—he practiced it daily. He sought mystical visions through methods like scrying, protected himself from possession, and tried to place curses on people who had wronged him. He openly discussed his magical practices, and many interviews and personal accounts confirm his involvement with the occult.
Biographer Ted Morgan said: "For Graham Greene, being a former Catholic was the most important thing. For Burroughs, believing in a magical universe was the most important thing. The same drive that led him to cast curses, he believed, was the source of his writing. To Burroughs, the spiritual world, psychic visitations, curses, possession, and phantom beings existed behind everyday life."
Burroughs believed his writing had a magical purpose. This was especially true with his use of the cut-up technique. He insisted the technique was not for artistic reasons but for "political warfare, scientific research, personal therapy, magical divination, and conjuration." The idea was that the cut-up method helped users "break down the barriers that surround consciousness." He said:
I found that when I used the cut-up technique, the words did not just randomly combine. They often meant something, and sometimes those meanings referred to future events. I made many cut-ups and later recognized that they described things I read later in newspapers or books, or events that happened. Perhaps events are already written and recorded, and cutting up words allows the future to be seen.
In his final years, Burroughs became deeply involved in the chaos magic movement. His techniques, like the cut-up and playback, were used by practitioners such as Phil Hine, Dave Lee, and Genesis P-Orridge. P-Orridge studied under Burroughs and Brion Gysin for over a decade. This connection led Burroughs to contribute material to the book Between Spaces: Selected Rituals & Essays From The Archives Of Templum Nigri Solis. Through this, he met key figures in the chaos magic movement, including Hine, Lee, Peter J. Carroll, Ian Read, Ingrid Fischer, and Douglas Grant, who led the North American branch of the Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT). Burroughs became fully initiated into the IOT. His friend James Grauerholz said: "William was very serious about his studies and initiation into the IOT. Our longtime friend, Douglas Grant, was a prime mover."
The only newspaper columnist Burroughs admired was Westbrook Pegler, a right-wing writer for the William Randolph Hearst newspaper chain. Burroughs supported frontier individualism, which he called "our glorious frontier heritage on minding your own business." He saw liberalism as government overreach, believing that authority was a group of people limiting personal freedom. His biographer Ted Morgan said his life philosophy was to follow a laissez-faire path, free from restrictions—a belief shared with the capitalist business world. Despite his dislike of government, Burroughs used its programs for his benefit. In 1949, he enrolled in Mexico City College under the GI Bill, which paid for part of his education and provided a monthly stipend. He said, "I always say, keep your snout in the public trough." In a 1984 interview, he said about libertarianism: "That’s sensible enough, of course. The fewer laws, the better."
Literary style and periods
Burroughs's important works can be grouped into four time periods. The dates show when he wrote them, not when they were published. Some books were published many years after they were written.
Burroughs also wrote many essays and created a lot of personal writings. One of his books, My Education: A Book of Dreams, gives a detailed description of his own dreams.
Many literary critics were very critical of Burroughs's work. For example, Anatole Broyard and Philip Toynbee wrote very negative reviews of some of his most important books. In a short essay called A Review of the Reviewers, Burroughs responded to his critics by saying:
Critics often complain about writers not having standards, but they themselves use personal opinions instead of fair rules. He believed standards do exist. Matthew Arnold suggested three rules for judging writing: 1. What is the writer trying to achieve? 2. How well does the writer do it? 3. Does the work deal with serious topics like good and evil, life and death, and the human condition? Burroughs added a fourth rule: Write about things you know. He thought more writers fail because they write about things they don't understand.
Burroughs made it clear he wanted to be judged using these standards instead of personal opinions about a book. Even though he was a complex person, he criticized Anatole Broyard for assuming Burroughs had certain intentions in his writing that weren't there. This put him in conflict with both New Criticism and the older approach represented by Matthew Arnold.
Burroughs used photography a lot during his career. He used it to plan his writing and as part of his art. His art included photos and other images in his cut-up techniques. He worked with Ian Sommerville to explore how photography could be used as a memory tool. They took and retake photos in complex ways to create time-image arrangements.
Legacy
William S. Burroughs is often considered one of the most important writers of the 20th century. Norman Mailer, a well-known writer, once said that Burroughs was "the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius." In addition to his writing, Burroughs is known for his ideas and attitudes. Many respected people have praised his work, including British writer Peter Ackroyd, rock critic Lester Bangs, philosopher Gilles Deleuze, and authors such as Michael Moorcock, J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Jean Genet, William Gibson, Alan Moore, Kathy Acker, and Ken Kesey. German writer Carl Weissner, who translated Burroughs's books for German readers, often used a writing style similar to Burroughs's.
Burroughs continues to influence modern writers. The New Wave and cyberpunk styles of science fiction are especially inspired by his work. Writers from the late 1970s and early 1980s, such as William Gibson and John Shirley, were influenced by him. A British magazine called Interzone, started in 1982, was named in honor of his work. Many musicians, including Roger Waters, David Bowie, Patti Smith, Genesis P-Orridge, Ian Curtis, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Todd Tamanend Clark, John Zorn, Tom Waits, Gary Numan, and Kurt Cobain, have cited Burroughs as an influence. Some musical groups have names that directly reference his work, such as Soft Machine, The Insect Trust, Steely Dan, Naked Lunch (two bands), Interzone, Thin White Rope, Clem Snide, and Success Will Write Apocalypse Across the Sky.
Ira Silverberg, who made a film about Burroughs, said that Burroughs's most radical work often came from people trying to escape their backgrounds. He noted that Burroughs's work was uniquely American because it showed how someone from a wealthy Midwestern family could break away from their roots.
Themes in Burroughs's writing, such as drugs, homosexuality, and death, have influenced other writers. Dennis Cooper, whom Burroughs called "a born writer," was influenced by Burroughs. Cooper wrote that Burroughs, along with Jean Genet, John Rechy, and Ginsberg, helped make homosexuality seem more accepted and respected. Splatterpunk writer Poppy Z. Brite has also referenced this part of Burroughs's work. Burroughs's writing is still discussed today. For example, a 2004 episode of the TV show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation included a character named Dr. Benway, inspired by a character from Burroughs's books. This is similar to a scene in the movie Repo Man, made during Burroughs's lifetime, which also featured Dr. Benway and a character named Mr. Lee (a name Burroughs used).
Burroughs also influenced ideas about the occult and secret knowledge. People like Peter Lamborn Wilson and Genesis P-Orridge, who were inspired by him, helped spread these ideas. Robert Anton Wilson, a writer, said that Burroughs was the first person to mention the "23 Enigma," a belief that the number 23 has special meaning. Burroughs shared a story about a sailor named Captain Clark who died in an accident after claiming he had never had one. Later, a radio report mentioned another accident involving a pilot named Captain Clark on Flight 23.
Some research suggests that Burroughs may have influenced the 2012 phenomenon, a belief that a major change in human consciousness would happen in 2012. Though Burroughs never focused on the year 2012, he wrote about a major change in the 1960s in his book The Exterminator. People like Terence McKenna and Jose Argüelles, who promoted the 2012 idea, were influenced by Burroughs.
Burroughs appears on the cover of The Beatles’ 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, where he is in the middle of the second row.