Profile of William S. Burroughs on Famous Like Me

William Seward Burroughs (February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American novelist, essayist, social critic and spoken word performer. Much of Burroughs' work is semi-autobiographical. He saw all his writing as a single, vast book.

Life

Burroughs was born to a prominent family in St. Louis, Missouri. His grandfather, also named William Seward Burroughs, founded the Burroughs Adding Machine company, which evolved into the Burroughs Corporation. Burroughs' mother, Laura Lee Burroughs, was the daughter of a distinguished minister whose family claimed to be descendants of Robert E. Lee. Burroughs’ parents ran an antique and gift shop, first in St. Louis, then in Palm Beach, Florida. Burroughs attended John Burroughs School in St. Louis, and The Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, but was expelled from the latter because staff had found private journals concerning a budding erotic attachment to another boy. He kept his sexual orientation concealed well into adulthood. Burroughs graduated from Harvard University in 1936.

After leaving Harvard, Burroughs traveled to Europe. He also contracted syphilis. In Austria, Burroughs met Ilse Klapper, a Jewish woman fleeing the country’s Nazi government. The two were not romantically attached, but Burroughs married her in Croatia to allow her to gain a United States Visa. She made her way to New York City, and eventually divorced Burroughs, although they remained friends for many years. Burroughs enrolled as a graduate student of Anthropology at Harvard and later enrolled at Medical School in Vienna, Austria. He was enlisted briefly in the U.S Army in 1941 but was discharged for psychological reasons. Burroughs lived on a monthly trust account from his parents, and this provided him little need, or desire, to earn money. In New York, he met Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.

In 1944, Burroughs began living with Joan Vollmer Adams in an apartment they shared with Kerouac and Edie Parker, Kerouac's first wife. Vollmer Adams was married to a GI and they had a young daughter, Julie Adams. Burroughs and Kerouac got into trouble with the law for failing to report a murder. Burroughs began using morphine and quickly became addicted. He even eventually came to sell heroin in Greenwich Village to support his habit. Vollmer also became an addict but her drug of choice was the nasal inhaled form of the amphetamine, Benzedrine. Because of her addiction and social circle, her husband immediately divorced her after returning from the war. Vollmer would became Burroughs’ common law wife. Burroughs was arrested for forging a narcotics prescription and was sentenced to return to his parents' care in St. Louis. He returned to New York, got Vollmer out of the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital and moved with her and her daughter to Texas. Vollmer soon became pregnant with Burroughs’ child. Their son, William S. Burroughs Jr. was born in 1947. The family moved briefly to New Orleans in 1948.

He was arrested after police searched his home and found letters between Burroughs and Ginsberg referring to a possible delivery of marijuana. Burroughs fled to Mexico to escape 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 charge's statute of limitations. In 1951, Burroughs accidentally shot and killed Vollmer in a drunken game of 'William Tell' at a party above an American-owned bar in Mexico City. He spent 13 days in jail before the killing was ruled accidental. 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.

In 1991, with Burroughs’ sanction, director David Cronenberg took on the seemingly impossible task of adapting Naked Lunch into a full-length feature film. The film opened to critical acclaim. Through the 1990s, Burroughs produced spoken word recordings, including collaborations with R.E.M.. Burroughs lived in Lawrence, Kansas through much of his later life. Burroughs died in Lawrence, at 6:50 p.m. on August 2, 1997 from complications of the previous day's heart attack. A few months after his death, a collection of writings spanning his entire career, Word Virus, was published. A collection of journal entries written during the final months of Burrough's life were published as the book Last Words.

Career

After Vollmer's death, Burroughs drifted through South America for several months, looking for a drug called Yage, which could supposedly ease opiate addiction. He produced two novels during this time, Junky, exploring his heroin addiction, and Queer exploring his homosexuality. He also compiled correspondence with Allen Ginsberg about his search for and experiences with Yage as The Yage Letters. The Yage Letters and Queer were not published until 1963 and 1985 respectively. Junky was published by Ace Paperbacks in 1953 under the pen name William Lee.

Burroughs went to Rome and then to Tangiers, Morocco, and began to write what would become Naked Lunch). Ginsberg and Kerouac helped Burroughs edit these episodes into Naked Lunch, an amalgam of experimental fiction and science fiction. Burroughs sold Naked Lunch to Olympia Press publisher Maurice Girodias. After the novel was published in 1959, it became infamous across Europe and was popular within countercultures of the 1960s. In countries where the book was banned, copies and even printing plates were smuggled across borders. Published in the United States, Naked Lunch was prosecuted as obscene by the state of Massachusetts, followed by other states. In 1966 the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court declared the work "not obscene" based on criteria developed, largely, to defend the book. The case against Burroughs's novel still stands as the last obscenity trial against a work of literature prosecuted in the United States. The trunk of manuscripts that produced Naked Lunch also produced The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1963).

In the 1970s he moved to New York City because Ginsberg had got him a job teaching writing at New York City College. Burroughs also associated with New York cultural players Andy Warhol, Patti Smith, Susan Sontag, Dennis Hopper, Terry Southern, and Mick Jagger. The 1970s also saw Burroughs join, then leave the Church of Scientology . His subsequent critical writings about the church and his review of a book entitled Inside Scientology by Robert Kaufman led to a battle of letters between Burroughs and Scientology supporters that played out in the pages of Rolling Stone. By late 1980s, Burroughs was a counterculture giant and collaborated with performers ranging from Bill Laswell's Material and Laurie Anderson to Ministry, and in Gus Van Sant's 1989 film Drugstore Cowboy, playing a character largely based on himself. In 1990, he released the spoken word album Dead City Radio, with musical back-up from producers Hal Willner and Nelson Lyon, and alternative rock band Sonic Youth. He also collaborated with director Robert Wilson and musician Tom Waits to create The Black Rider, a play.

Burroughs reputation and influence is disputed. He continues to be named as an influence by contemporary fiction writers like William Gibson, and many others. He remains controversial because of his homosexuality, drug use, and the seeming obscene and misogynistic tone of his works. He was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983.

Bibliography

Prose

• Junkie (1953)- (ISBN 0142003166) - novel
• Naked Lunch (1959) (ISBN 0802132952)- novel
• Minutes To Go (1960)
• The Exterminator (1960) (with Bryon Gysin)
• The Soft Machine (1961) (ISBN 0802133290) - novel
• The Ticket That Exploded (1962) (ISBN 0802151507) - novel
• Dead Fingers Talk (1963) - novel
• The Yage Letters (1963) (with Allen Ginsberg
• Nova Express (1964) (ISBN 0802133304) - novel
• Valentine's Day Reading (1965)
• Roosevelt After Inauguration and Other Atrocities (1965; later republished 1979) - short stories
• Time (1965)
• APO-33 (1966)
• So Who Owns Death TV? (1967)
• The Dead Star (1969)
• The Job (1969) (ISBN 0140118829) (with Daniel Odier)
• The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (1969) (ISBN 1559702117)
• Jack Kerouac (1970) (with Claude Pelieu)
• "Ali's Smile" (1971)
• The Wild Boys (1971) (ISBN 0802133312)- novel
• Electronic Revolution (1971)
• Bryon Gysin Let the Mice In (1973) (with Gysin)
• Exterminator! (1973) (ISBN 0140050035) (a different book than the 1960 volume)- short stories
• White Subway (1973)
• Mayfair Academy Series More or Less (1973)
• Port of Saints (1973) (ISBN 0912652640) - novel
• The Book of Breething (1974)
• Sidetripping (1975) (with Charles Gatewood)
• Snack (1975)
• Cobble Stone Gardens (1976)
• The Retreat Diaries (1976)
• Colloque de Tangier (1976) (with Bryon Gysin)
• Letters to Allen Ginsberg 1953-1957 (1976)
• The Third Mind (1977) (with Gysin; first English printing in 1978)
• Ali's Smile/Naked Scientology (1978)
• Colloque de Tangier Vol. 2 (1979) (with Bryon Gysin, Gérard-Georges Lemaire)
• Blade Runner, A Movie (1979)
• "Dr. Benway" (1979)
• "Ah Pook is Here!" (1979)
• Streets of Chance (1981)
• Early Routines (1981)
• Cities of the Red Night (1981) (ISBN 0030539765) - novel
• Ah Pook is Here, Nova Express, Cities of the Red Night (1981) (ISBN 0312278462)
• "Sinki's Sauna" (1982)
• The Place of Dead Roads (1983) (ISBN 0312278659) - novel
• "Ruski" (1984)
• The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1984)
• The Burroughs File (1984)
• The Adding Machine: Collected Essays (1985) (ISBN 1559702109)
• Queer (1985) (ISBN 0140083898)- novel
• The Cat Inside (1986) (with Bryon Gysin) - novella
• The Western Lands (1987) (ISBN 0140094563) - novel
• The Whole Tamale (c.1987-88)
• Interzone (1987) (ISBN 0140094512) - short stories
• Apocalypse (1988) (with Keith Haring)
• Tornado Alley (1989) - short stories
• Uncommon Quotes Vol. 1 (1989)
• Ghost of Chance (1991; later reprinted 1997) (ISBN 1852424575) - novella
• "Seven Deadly Sins" (1992)
• Paper Cloud; Thick Pages (1992)
• Selected Letters (1993)
• My Education: A Book of Dreams (1995) (ISBN 0140094547) - novel
• Word Virus : The William Burroughs Reader (1998) (ISBN 0006552145)
• Burroughs Live : The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960-1997 (2000) (ISBN 1584350105)
• Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs (2000) (ISBN 0802137784)

Recordings and Film

• Call Me Burroughs (1965) - The English Bookshop, Paris (reissued in 1995 by Rhino Word Beat)
• Nothing Here Now But The Recordings (1981) - LP Industrial Records IR0016
• Dead City Radio (1990) - Island Records
• Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales (1993) - Island Records (features the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy)
• the "Priest" they called him (1992) - Burroughs' voice and Kurt Cobain playing guitar
• Is Everybody In? (track 11 of Stoned Immaculate: The Music of the Doors, 2000) - Burroughs reads poetry by Jim Morrison over music provided by The Doors.
• Material: Seven Souls. An album recorded with Bill Laswell.

References

• Grauerholz, James. Word Virus. New York: Grove, 1998.
• Miles, Barry. William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible, A Portrait, New York: Hyperion, 1992.
• Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw. New York: Avon, 1988.

External Links

• Lines of Advance -- Burroughs audio, image, text.
• William S. Burroughs at Literary Kicks
• Interzone.org 5 linked websites on William Burroughs and Brion Gysin.
• William S. Burroughs Internet Database
• The Western Lands
• Interzone Web Ring
• William Burroughs and Brion Gysin resources
• Interzone Academy
• Reporters Redacteurs d'Interzone
• Other Minds Archive: William Burroughs Press Conference at Berkeley Museum of Art on November 12, 1974 Streaming audio.
• rotten.com library biography
• Naropa Audio Archives: William S. Burroughs class on the technology and ethic of wishing (June 25th, 1986) Streaming audio and 64 kbit/s MP3 ZIP file.
• Naropa Audio Archives: William S. Burroughs lecture on public discourse. (August 11th, 1980) Streaming audio and 64 kbit/s MP3 ZIP file.
• Interzone Creations Creations inspirated by Burroughs & Gysin's work.
• The Interzone Coffee House Fan-based site.
• The death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs In-dept research article into the shooting of Joan Burroughs by James W Grauerholz
• Shooting Joan Burroughs at Beats In Kansas.
• Essay on Junky by Will Self.
• Article on Counterculture and Burroughs by Jonathan Leyser
• Zed TV: "Ah Pook is Here" Animated film by Philip Hunt, inspired by Burroughs' text.
• Studio AKA: "Ah Pook is Here" Excerpt from animated film by Philip Hunt.
• Language Is A Virus Online Cut-Up Machine, the cut-up writing technique
• 1984 audio interview of William Burroughs, RealAudio
• Blue Neon Alley - William S. Burroughs directory

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