- Born
- 5 February 1914St. Louis, Missouri, USA
- Died
- 2 August 1997Lawrence, Kansas, USA · aged 83
William S. Burroughs
The author of “Naked Lunch” was a founding figure of the Beat Generation – and wrote openly about desire between men decades before it was accepted.
William Seward Burroughs grew up in a wealthy family in St. Louis; his grandfather had founded the Burroughs Adding Machine Company. As a teenager he was attracted to boys and long kept it hidden from his family. He studied English at Harvard and spent time in Vienna, where he moved in the gay subculture. There he married a Jewish woman fleeing the Nazis, purely so that she could obtain a visa for the United States.
In 1944 in New York he met Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac; together they formed the core of what became the Beat Generation. Burroughs became addicted to heroin, an addiction that shaped his life and his work. In 1951 in Mexico City he shot his second wife, Joan Vollmer, during a drunken attempt to shoot a glass off her head; he was convicted of manslaughter in absentia.
His first novel, “Junkie” (1953), was followed by years in Tangier, where he wrote “Naked Lunch” (1959). Its depiction of drugs and sex between men led to one of the last major obscenity trials in the United States, which ended in 1966 with the book being cleared. With the artist Brion Gysin he developed the cut-up technique. His novel “Queer”, written in the early 1950s about his longing for a younger man, was only published in 1985.
Burroughs influenced generations of writers and musicians, from punk to David Bowie. He spent his last years in Lawrence, Kansas, painting and writing, and died there in 1997, aged 83.