Burroughs, William S. (5 Feb. 1914-2 Aug. 1997), author, was born William Seward Burroughs II near Forest Park in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Mortimer Burroughs, an MIT graduate who ran a glass business, and Laura Lee Burroughs, a preacher's daughter and debutante intrigued by spiritualism. His later life would contrast sharply with his origins in what the Progressive-era theorist Thorstein Veblen called the "leisure class." A brother of Burroughs's mother, Ivy Ledbetter Lee, was a pioneer of public relations and advised John D. Rockefeller, Jr.; Burroughs's paternal grandfather, William Seward Burroughs, was an inventor who developed a practical adding machine.

At age four, Burroughs later claimed, he was sexually molested by a male friend of a beloved nanny. The incident purportedly left him with a long-repressed psychological injury. Shy and awkward, he read horror fiction and tales about cowboys and gangsters. At age eight he began writing his own stories, such as "The Autobiography of a Wolf." He was enthralled by a criminal's autobiography, which "sounded good to me compared with the dullness of a Midwest suburb where all contact with life was shut out" (quoted in Grauerholz and Silverburg, p. xxi). Young Burroughs "would break into houses and walk around without taking anything . . . Sometimes I would drive around in the country with a .22 rifle, shooting chickens" (quoted in Grauerholz and Silverberg, p. xxi). Afflicted with sinus troubles, he was sent at age fifteen to the dry atmosphere of New Mexico, where he entered a boy's academy, Los Alamos Ranch School. There he became a skilled marksman and knife thrower, developed a homosexual attachment to another boy, and experimented with drugs by swallowing a near-fatal dose of "knockout drops" (chloral hydrate).

In 1932 Burroughs entered Harvard. There he kept a loaded gun and a ferret in his room and was "just a completely beat down person with no idea of who he was or what he was" (quoted in Miles, p. 30). But he loved to read--especially Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Thomas De Quincy--and graduated with a bachelor's degree in American literature in 1936. He then traveled to Europe and entered the University of Vienna medical school, but left after one semester. In Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, he became acquainted with gay intellectuals; a woman in their circle, Ilse Klapper, a German Jew hoping to escape the Nazis, persuaded him to marry her in 1937 so she could enter the United States. They separated after she moved to America and divorced after the war.

In Chicago in 1939 he attended lectures by Alfred Korzybski (1879-1950) on his iconoclastic linguistic doctrine of "general semantics." Also in the late 1930s Burroughs attended graduate school, studying psychology and anthropology at Columbia University and anthropology at Harvard. At Harvard he befriended Kells Elvins, a dark-humored man who helped inspire Burroughs's own bleak wit. Together they wrote a satirical article, "Twilight's Last Gleamings," which introduced the most famous recurring character in Burroughs's writings, "Dr. Benway," a darkly comic symbol of science gone berserk. While attending Columbia, Burroughs developed a crush on another man, who did not fully reciprocate the passion. Heartbroken, Burroughs deliberately used shears to cut off the end of his left little finger. He was committed to a psychiatric clinic, then sent home to his parents. After the United States entered the war in late 1941, Burroughs was drafted into the infantry; he managed to get out early, thanks to his mother's influential connections. In Chicago he worked as a door-to-door insect exterminator, saw a psychiatrist, and plotted (but did not undertake) robberies. In 1943 he followed two St. Louis friends, Lucien Carr and David Kammerer, to New York. At Kammerer's apartment Burroughs met the budding poet Allen Ginsberg. Carr introduced Burroughs to future novelist Jack Kerouac. Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs--later the three central figures of the 1950s "Beat Generation," which would defy orthodoxies in postwar American life and culture--became close friends who loved talking about literature. Being older and more erudite, Burroughs assigned Ginsberg and Kerouac "reading lists" that included Arthur Rimbaud, Oswald Spengler, and Jonathan Swift.

In August 1944, Carr knifed Kammerer to death, ostensibly to repel unwanted sexual advances. Although Burroughs and Kerouac were arrested for failing to report the killing, they were let off (Carr spent two years in prison); no publisher would take the mystery story that they based on the killing. Through Kerouac and Ginsberg, Burroughs met Joan Vollmer, a divorced single mother and journalism student at Columbia. Despite his homosexuality, Burroughs established a sexual relationship with Vollmer; by 1945 they shared an apartment with her young daughter, Julie. The couple, who eventually had a common-law marriage but were never formally married, heavily used the drug Benzedrine.

Burroughs also fenced stolen drugs, robbed drunks, and became addicted to heroin. He received a suspended sentence for obtaining narcotics with a faked doctor's prescription. With Joan and Julie, Burroughs then moved to New Waverly, Texas, where he grew marijuana in hopes of selling it; there, he and Vollmer had a son, William Seward "Billy" Burroughs, Jr. (III), born in 1947. After further run-ins with the law, Burroughs moved his family in September 1949 to Mexico City, where he entered Mexico City College, worked on a prospective novel, and had homosexual encounters. At a party in September 1951, while drunkenly trying to shoot a water glass off the top of Joan's head, he shot and killed her.

"I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death," Burroughs later wrote. "[T]he death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out" (quoted in Miles, p. 53). With the help of a nephew of A. A. Wyn at Ace Paperbacks, Burroughs managed to sell the firm his first book, Junkie (later reproduced as Junky). It was double-bound with the memoirs of a narcotics detective and published under the pseudonym William Lee. Junkie/Junky offered a coldly clinical yet grimly witty view of an addict's life, neither apologizing for it nor whitewashing its ghastliness: "You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in any other direction. Junk wins by default" (quoted in Grauerholz and Silverberg, p. 49).

After various travels--including a trip to South America, where he sought a powerful hallucinogen called yage--Burroughs settled in Tangier, Morocco, a haven for drug users and homosexuals (later the inspiration for his fictional dystopia, "Interzone"). Another resident was writer Paul Bowles, who later recalled Burroughs as a man who "lay in bed all day, shot heroin, and practiced sharpshooting with a pistol against the wall of his room" (Miles, p. 78). Burroughs subsequently said in Naked Lunch, "I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of terminal addiction . . . I did absolutely nothing. I could look at the end of my shoe for eight hours." Eventually, he went to London to undergo Dr. John Yerbury Dent's "apomorphine cure" for addiction and then returned to Tangier where he wrote energetically. In 1958 he moved to Paris, staying at what was later called the "Beat Hotel." While in Paris Burroughs met the artist Brion Gysin, who would become a devoted friend and have a major creative influence on him.

Burroughs's career-making book was The Naked Lunch (1959, later republished without the definite article), which depicted the urban jungle of drug addicts "shivering in the junk-sick morning" (Skerl and Lydenberg, p. 137). It also satirized Americans' conformism, homophobia, Cold War anxieties, and the psychiatric establishment, symbolized by the sinister Dr. Benway. Many readers, baffled by the book's unorthodox structure and disjointed narrative style, were repelled by its grotesqueries, which included cannibalism and hangings with erotic overtones. Initially, Naked Lunch had trouble with American censors, and the U.S. Post Office refused to distribute magazines publishing extracts from the book. In a number of court cases, including one before the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 1966, it was deemed not obscene and thereby gained free distribution.

Reviewers quarreled over Naked Lunch. In a review in the Times Literary Supplement titled "UGH . . . ," John Willett said reading Naked Lunch is "not unlike wading through the drains of a big city . . . [It features] unspeakable homosexual fantasies . . . If the publishers had deliberately set out to discredit the cause of literary freedom and innovation they could hardly have done it more effectively" (Skerl and Lydenberg, p. 44). Dame Edith Sitwell compared reading such a book to having one's nose nailed to a lavatory. But Burroughs won praise from other writers, such as Norman Mailer, who called Burroughs the "only living American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius" (Miles, p. 17). The poet John Ciardi described Burroughs as "a writer of great power and artistic integrity engaged in a profoundly meaningful search for true values" (Skerl and Lydenberg, p. 22). To Marshall McLuhan, the assaults of Burroughs's critics were "a little like trying to criticize the sartorial and verbal manifestations of a man who is knocking on the door to explain that flames are leaping from the roof of our home" (Skerl and Lydenberg, p. 73). Newsweek called Naked Lunch "a masterpiece, but a totally insane and anarchic one" (Miles, p. 106).

In the early 1960s Burroughs's output included The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964). These exploited "cut-ups," a technique that Burroughs learned from Gysin. After texts are literally cut up, unrelated lines are joined, resulting in hybrid passages that Burroughs sometimes found poetic: for example, "Raw peeled winds of hate and mischance blew the shot" (quoted in George-Warren, p. 214). Samuel Beckett reportedly dismissed cut-ups as "plumbing . . . not writing!" (Bockris, p. 214). But to Burroughs, it was a form true to the experience of life: "Every time you look out the window, or answer the phone, your consciousness is being cut by random factors. Walk down the street--bam, bam, bam" (quoted in George-Warren, p. 211).

Burroughs's reputation among the youthful avant-garde broadened after the Beatles included his face on the crowded cover of their record album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Amid the student revolts of the 1960s, he depicted the young as the ideal agents of rebellion in his novel The Wild Boys (1971), which featured homosexual youth gangs in a futuristic, post-apocalyptic world. To the critic Alfred Kazin, Burroughs's work in general was solipsistic: "a world forever being reshuffled in the mind, a world that belongs to oneself like the contents of a dream" (Murphy, p. 142). Timothy Murphy, however, perceived a politically radical fantasy in The Wild Boys. One character says: "We intend to destroy all dogmatic verbal systems. The family unit and its cancerous expansion into tribes, countries, nations we will eradicate at its vegetable roots. We don't want to hear any more family talk, mother talk, father talk, cop talk, priest talk, country talk or party talk" (quoted in Murphy, p. 33).

After living rather reclusively in London for much of the period 1962-1974, Burroughs returned to the United States, taught at the City College of New York, and gave public readings. Contradicting his reputation as a drug fiend, he came across in public as a reserved, well-dressed man with a stone face and a dry, nasal voice. Admirers introduced him to such celebrities as Andy Warhol, Christopher Isherwood, and Tennessee Williams and to rock music stars including David Bowie, Kurt Cobain, and Deborah Harry; many of their conversations were tape-recorded and subsequently edited by Victor Bockris in With William Burroughs: Report from the Bunker (1996). Burroughs had small roles in several films, including Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and My Own Private Idaho (1991). Despite his professed disdain for women, he befriended female writers, including Susan Sontag, and performed on stage with performance artist Laurie Anderson. In 1981, on the television show "Saturday Night Live," Lauren Hutton introduced Burroughs as the greatest living American writer. That same year he published the novel Cities of the Red Night, an apocalyptic blend of science fiction, detective fiction, boys' adventure tales, and other genres. A gun enthusiast, Burroughs earned substantial money by selling abstract paintings created by shooting cans of paint placed beside plywood panels. His successes were darkened, though, by his continued woes, including a recurrence of his heroin addiction. Doctors placed him on a methadone maintenance program. His grown-up son Billy, Jr., after a promising start as a writer, struggled with drug and alcohol abuse and died in 1981 at age thirty-four. Burroughs's worldview remained as bleak as his mask-like face: "There are no friends . . . There are allies. There are accomplices" (quoted in Miles, p. 138).

In 1983 Burroughs moved to Lawrence, Kansas, partly because land was cheap there and he could own a home; by settling in a small university town, he thought he could also get away from the big-city temptation of returning to drug abuse. In Lawrence, Burroughs wrote his last major books, among them The Place of Dead Roads (1983) and The Western Lands (1987). Thanks to Ginsberg's campaigning, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The French minister of culture designated him as a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 1992 director David Cronenberg made a movie version of Naked Lunch, which was considered by some critics to be viscerally shocking. A deeply private man at heart, Burroughs kept numerous cats in his simple Kansas home, supported a foundation to protect lemurs, and took solitary boat trips on a lake. As he aged, he reflected on his tortured life: "People think of me as being cold--some woman wrote that I could not admit any feeling at all. My God. I am so emotional that sometimes I can't stand the intensity . . . I'm very subject to violent fits of weeping, for very good reasons" (quoted in Bockris, p. 248). He died in Lawrence.

Burroughs was a key figure in the Beat Generation, which laid the groundwork for much cultural dissidence in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century. According to Nicholas Zurbrugg, he was the "professional wicked uncle of postmodernism" (Skerl and Lydenberg, p. 177). In Burroughs's works, Cary Nelson said, "scatology becomes eschatology" (Skerl and Lydenberg, p. 127). Burroughs showed how to blend genres once scorned as trashy--science fiction, Wild West stories, boys' adventure tales, detective fiction, and pornography--to express avant-garde visions and radical worldviews. He urged his readers to question orthodox Zeitgeists that limit human freedom: "Storm The Reality Studio. And retake the universe" (quoted in Skerl and Lydenberg, p. 106).

Burroughs's papers are divided among a host of repositories, including Butler Library, Columbia University; the International Center of Art and Communications, Vaduz, Switzerland; the George Arents Research Library, Syracuse University; and the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin. Burroughs often rewrote parts of his books for later editions; for example, The Soft Machine appears in three significantly different versions. He recorded his dreams and published them in My Education: A Book of Dreams (1995). Other works by him include Exterminator (with Brion Gysin, 1960), The Yage Letters (with Allen Ginsberg, 1963), The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (1970), Exterminator! (1973), The Adding Machine (1985), and Queer (1985). Major biographical accounts include Barry Miles, William Burroughs, El Hombre Invisible: A Portrait (1993) and Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (1988). Also see James Grauerholz's essays on different periods of Burroughs's life in Word Virus--The William S. Burroughs Reader, ed. Grauerholz and Ira Silverberg, with an insightful introduction by Ann Douglas (1998). Burroughs never wrote a formal autobiography, but a short memoir, "The Name is Burroughs," appears in his book The Adding Machine. Also see Burroughs's review of his life's work, "My Purpose Is to Write for the Space Age," New York Times Book Review, 19 Feb. 1984. John Tytell, Naked Angels: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs (1976), is a classic study of the Beats. Other assessments include Eric Mottram, William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need (1971); Robin Lydenberg, Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs' Fiction (1987); William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical Reception, 1959-1989, ed. Jennie Skerl and Robin Lydenberg (1991); and Timothy S. Murphy, Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs (1997). For Alfred Kazin's acute critique, see "He's Just Wild about Writing," New York Times Book Review, 12 Dec. 1971, p. 4. An obituary appeared in the New York Times, 3 Aug. 1997.