William Burroughs

William Burroughs came from a prominent and wealthy family – his grandfather founded the Burroughs Corporation and invented the Burroughs Adding Machine. Although he gained a degree in English Literature and a Masters in Anthropology at Harvard, he never held down a conventional job, living instead on an allowance from his parents. This gave him the freedom to write, while his unconventional life – Burroughs was a drug addict and closet homosexual – often gave him his subject matter.

His drug addition led to him fleeing to Mexico to escape charges, followed by his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer. Here, in a drunken game of William Tell, he accidentally shot and killed her. The tragedy changed his life and inspired his writing. He drifted through South America and began writing. His early works included the hyper realistic novel Junkie (1953).

Moving from South America to Tangiers, he began compiling a series of texts he called ‘the word hoard’, later to became his most famous work, Naked Lunch, which popularised the ‘cut-up’ technique (where text is cut-up at random and arranged to create a new text). Although not strictly science fiction, Naked Lunch did seem to foretell – in horrific style - the crack epidemic, AIDS, liposuction and even the internet.

Burroughs’ works infuenced several of the beat poets of the 1950s, such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. The hippies of the 1960s adopted him as a cult author and the punks of the 1970s considered him a member of the family. The rock band Steely Dan was named after a steam-powered sex toy in Naked Lunch. Burroughs continued to work until his death in 1997, concentrating on the spoken word genre, where parts of his poems were randomly taped together, narrated at a recording studio and later merged together as songs.