A short BIO
Burroughs, William S(eward) (b. Feb. 5, 1914, St. Louis, Mo., U.S.), American writer of experimental novels that evoke, in deliberately erratic prose, a nightmarish, sometimes wildly humorous world. His sexual explicitness (he was an avid, outspoken homosexual) and the frankness with which he dealt with his own experiences as a drug addict won him a following among writers of the Beat movement.
Burroughs was the grandson of the inventor of the Burroughs adding machine and grew up in St. Louis in comfortable circumstances, graduating from Harvard University in 1936 and continuing study there in archaeology and ethnology. Having tired of the academic world, he then held a variety of jobs. He served for a while with the U.S. Army during World War II. Becoming addicted to drugs--notably heroin--in New York City in 1944, he moved with his second wife to Mexico, where in 1951 he shot and killed her in a tragic accident. Fleeing Mexico, he wandered through the Amazon region of South America, continuing his experiments with drugs, a period of his life detailed in The Yage Letters, his correspondence with Allen Ginsberg written in 1953 but not published until 1963. Between travels he lived in London, Paris, Tangiers, and New York City but in 1981 settled in Lawrence, Kan.
He used the pen name William Lee in his first published book, Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (1953, reissued 1977), an account of the addict''s life. Naked Lunch (Paris, 1959; New York City, 1962), was completed after his treatment for drug addiction. All forms of addiction, according to Burroughs, are counterproductive for writing, and the only gain to his own work from his 15 years as an addict came from the knowledge that he garnered about the bizarre, carnival milieu in which the drug taker is preyed upon as victim. The grotesqueness of this world is vividly satirized in Naked Lunch, which also is much preoccupied with homosexuality and police persecution. In the novels that followed--notably, The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), Nova Express (1964), The Wild Boys (1971), Exterminator! (1973), The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (1975), Cities of the Red Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1983), Queer (1985), and The Western Lands (1987)--Burroughs further experimented with the structure of the novel. Burroughs (1983), by filmmaker Howard Brookner, is a documentary on the artist''s life.