Biography of William S. Burroughs

Name: William S. Burroughs
Bith Date: February 5, 1914
Death Date: August 2, 1997
Place of Birth: St. Louis, Missouri, United States
Nationality: American
Gender: Male
Occupations: writer

William S. Burroughs

An innovative and controversial author of experimental fiction, William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) is best known for Naked Lunch (1959), a bizarre account of his fourteen-year drug addiction and a surrealistic indictment of middle-class American mores.

William S. Burroughs was the grandson of the industrialist who modernized the adding machine and the son of a woman who claimed descent from Civil War General Robert E. Lee. In 1936, he received his bachelor's degree in English from Harvard University. In 1944, after abortive attempts at, among other things, graduate study in anthropology, medical school in Vienna, Austria, and military service, he met Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and began using morphine. The meeting of these three writers is generally regarded as the beginning of the Beat movement; the writers who later became part of this group produced works that attacked moral and artistic conventions. The escalation of Burroughs's drug addiction, his unsuccessful search for cures, and his travels to Mexico to elude legal authorities are recounted in his first novel, Junkie: The Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (1953; republished as Junky). Written in the confessional style of pulp magazines under the pseudonym William Lee, the novel received little critical notice. In 1957, Burroughs traveled to London to undergo a controversial drug treatment known as apomorphine. Following two relapses, he was successfully cured of his addiction.

Ostensibly the story of junkie William Lee, Naked Lunch features no consistent narrative or point of view. The novel has been variously interpreted as a condemnation of the addict's lifestyle, as an allegory satirizing the repressiveness of American society, and as an experiment in literary form, exemplified by its attacks upon language as a narrow, symbolic tool of normative control. Consisting of elements from diverse genres, including the detective novel and science fiction, Naked Lunch depicts a blackly humorous, sinister world dominated by addiction, madness, grotesque physical metamorphoses, sadomasochistic homosexuality, and cartoon-like characters, including Dr. Benway, who utilizes weird surgical and chemical alterations to cure his patients. Escape from the imprisoning concepts of time and space are dominant themes in this work and in Burroughs's later fiction, reflecting the addict's absolute need for drugs and his dependency on what Burroughs termed "junk time." Burroughs explained the book's title as "the frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork."

Naked Lunch represents a selection from the wealth of material Burroughs had been writing for many years. The remaining work makes up the bulk of his immediately subsequent novels, The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964). During the process of writing these works, Burroughs, influenced by artist Brion Gysin, developed his "cut-up" and "fold-in" techniques, experiments similar in effect to collage painting. Collecting manuscript pages of his narrative episodes, or "routines," in random order, Burroughs folds some pages vertically, juxtaposing these with other passages to form new pages. This material, sometimes drawn from the works of other authors, is edited and rearranged to evoke new associations and break with traditional narrative patterns. In the surrealistic, quasi-science fiction sequels to Naked Lunch, Burroughs likens addiction to the infestation of a malignant alien virus, which preys upon the deep-seated fears of human beings and threatens to destroy the earth through parasitic possession of its inhabitants. The title of The Soft Machine, a novel emphasizing sexuality and drugs as a means of normative control throughout history, indicates the innate biological device which allows the virus entry into the human body. Mind control through word and image is the subject of The Ticket That Exploded. In this novel and in Nova Express, Burroughs suggests a number of remedies to the viral infestation. Although he expresses a cautious optimism, the crisis remains unresolved, and humanity's fate is uncertain at the saga's end.

In 1970, Burroughs announced his intention to write a second " mythology for the space age." Although his recent novels have generally received less acclaim than Naked Lunch and its sequels, critics have discerned a remarkably straightforward approach to these works, which rely less on cut-up strategies and horrific elements and more on complex, interrelated plots and positive solutions to escaping societal constraints. As Jennie Skerl noted: "In Burroughs's recent fiction, pleasure and freedom through fantasy balance the experience of repression, bondage, and death that the earlier works had emphasized." The universe of The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (1971) is similar to that of Burroughs's earlier books but is epic in proportion, encompassing galactic history and the whole of humanity in its scope. Time and space travel figure prominently in Cities of the Red Night: A Boys' Book (1981), in which detective Clem Snide traces the source of the alien virus to an ancient dystopian society. The Place of Dead Roads (1984) transfers the conflict to near-future South America, where descendants of the wild boys ally themselves with Venusian rebels in an escalating battle for galactic liberation.

Burroughs's novel Queer (1985) was written at the same time as Junkie and is considered its companion piece. According to Burroughs, the book was "motivated and formulated" by the accidental death of his wife in Mexico in 1951, for which Burroughs was held accountable. The novel centers once again on William Lee, chronicling a month of withdrawal in South America and his bitter, unrealized pursuit of a young American male expatriate. Harry Marten stated that the book functions as "neither a love story nor a tale of seduction but a revelation of rituals of communication which substitute for contact in a hostile or indifferent environment."

Burroughs is also well known for his nonfiction works. The Yage Letters (1963) contains his mid-1950s correspondence with Allen Ginsberg concerning his pursuit in Colombia of the legendary hallucinogen yage. Further correspondence is collected in Letters to Allen Ginsberg, 1953-1957 (1982). During the mid-1960s, Burroughs became an outspoken proponent of the apomorphine treatment, claiming that its illegal status in the United States was the result of a conspiracy between the Food and Drug Administration, police, and legal authorities. His arguments are presented in Health Bulletin, APO 33: A Report on the Synthesis of the Apomorphine Formula (1965) and APO 33, a Metabolic Regulator (1966). Burroughs's observations on literary, political, and esoteric topics appear in a collaborative venture with Daniel Odier, Entretiens avec William Burroughs (1969; revised and translated as The Job: Interviews with William Burroughs), and in his collection The Adding Machine: Collected Essays (1985). The Third Mind (1979), written in collaboration with Brion Gysin, is a theoretical manifesto of their early "cut-up" experiments. Burroughs has also written a screenplay, The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (1970).

Burroughs's controversial novels have provoked extreme critical reactions, ranging from claims of genius to allegations that he was little more than a pornographer. While his work can be offensive, it has elicited much serious criticism, and Burroughs is regarded by many scholars as an innovative, even visionary writer. Critics credit Burroughs's hallucinatory prose and antiestablishment views with inspiring the Beat movement and such counterculture groups as hippies and punks. Among other accomplishments, Burroughs has, perhaps more effectively than any other author, rendered the nightmarish, paranoid mindset of the drug addict. Harry Marten observed that Burroughs "[mixed] the satirist's impulse toward invective with the cartoonist's relish for exaggerated gesture, the collage artist's penchant for radical juxtapositions with the slam-bang pace of the carnival barker. In the process, he has mapped a grotesque modern landscape of disintegration whose violence and vulgarity is laced with manic humor."

The former heroin addict lived in the quiet town of Lawrence, Kansas with several cats and a collection of guns until his death from a heart attack on August 2, 1997. Although his business affairs were handled by his staff at the high tech William Burroughs Communications, the writer himself still used a typewriter. One of his more recent publications, The Letters of William S. Burroughs: 1945-1959 was used both as a journal and a sketchbook for his early work.

A former drug addict turned writer, experimental novelist William S. Burroughs embodies for many observers the artist as outsider and rebel. He has had a tremendous influence as one of the Beat generation of writers, as an avant-garde theorist, and as a counter-culture forerunner. His novel Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict outlines his life as a morphine addict; Naked Lunch successfully overturned America's obscenity laws; his innovative "cut- up" writing technique, his attacks on the control systems enslaving mankind, and his outspoken homosexuality have made him "one of the most controversial and influential writers of the past decades," as Bob Halliday describes him in the Washington Post Book World. Henry Allen, writing in the same publication, calls Burroughs "the model of modern man as pariah: eminence grise of the Beat generation, black sheep of the Burroughs adding machine family, junkie, intellectual crank ..., esoteric novelist ..., punk saint and grand old man of the seamy underbelly." Robert E. Burkholder admits in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook 1981 that Burroughs occupies "a strange cultural position as a major figure of contemporary avant-garde fiction and the so-called Godfather of Punk."

Burroughs comes from a distinguished family. His mother is descended from Civil War leader Robert E. Lee, while his paternal grandfather, for whom Burroughs is named, invented the adding machine and founded the Burroughs Corporation which today manufactures computer equipment. Burroughs has made clear on several occasions that his grandfather sold his share of the company upon retirement and that his family, although of prominent social standing, was not wealthy. He lives entirely on the royalties from his books.

Raised in St. Louis and educated in private schools, Burroughs, Jennie Skerl writes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, was "alienated from a suburban social environment perceived as both boring and hostile. He felt his homosexuality was only part of the reason for his alienation.... Timid and solitary, he turned to extensive reading for solace and dreamed of becoming a writer.... He early formed a view of the artist as an outlaw and adventurer." In 1936 Burroughs graduated from Harvard University, where he studied English literature. After graduation he tried his hand at several careers. He attended medical school in Vienna with the hope of becoming a doctor; he studied anthropology at Harvard's graduate school; he served in the U.S. Army for several months before being discharged for psychological reasons (he had deliberately cut off the first joint of a finger to impress a friend); and he worked as an advertising copywriter, exterminator, bartender, and private detective. "Burroughs's own description of his life during the years 1936 to 1944," Skerl recounts, "is one of aimless drifting and boredom."

This aimlessness ended in the mid-1940s when Burroughs was living in New York City. At that time he met several people who were to fundamentally alter the course of his later life. He met and married Joan Vollmer, a widow, in 1946. (Burroughs had previously married a German woman to allow her to legally enter the United States from Nazi Germany. They were divorced in 1946.) Joan introduced him to her friend Jack Kerouac, then a student at Columbia University, who in turn introduced Burroughs to Allen Ginsberg, an aspiring poet. Ginsberg relates in Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac that he and Kerouac found Burroughs "so interesting and intelligent and worldly wise that he seemed like some sort of intellectual spiritual man of distinction to us." In the same book, Burroughs recalls their initial meeting: "Joan and I were older, and we had done some more reading than they had at the time. I didn't think anything special about it. I recommended a number of books." Burroughs's apartment soon became a gathering place where the three men, later to form the core of the Beat literary movement, shared and discussed their ideas. In 1944 Burroughs also met Herbert Huncke, a drug addict, thief, and male prostitute who introduced him to morphine. Burroughs soon became an addict himself and was to remain one despite several attempts at a cure, until 1957.

Kerouac and Ginsberg's efforts to become writers inspired the older Burroughs to turn to fiction writing. He had made an earlier attempt in the 1930s to write detective stories, but that had ended in failure and Burroughs had not written anything since. He began to write seriously only in the 1940s. As Burroughs tells Charles Platt in Dream Makers, Volume 2: The Uncommon Men and Women Who Write Science Fiction, "I didn't write anything till was I thirty-five." He explains in Jack's Book that Kerouac "had suggested that I write and I wasn't too interested for a long time." He and Kerouac collaborated on a novel in the 1940s entitled "And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks," a title inspired by a radio broadcast about a fire in the St. Louis zoo.

But Burroughs's writing efforts were soon superseded by his troubles with the law. Because of police pressure in New York, brought on by his morphine addiction and resultant association with the underworld, Burroughs was obliged to move to Texas. When police pressure increased there because he was raising marijuana on his farm, Burroughs moved to Louisiana. After a police raid on his home in Louisiana in early 1949, Burroughs and Joan fled to Mexico to avoid drug and illegal weapons charges. The couple found Mexico to their liking. Morphine could be easily obtained by prescription; and benzedrine, which Joan used, was sold over the counter. For a time Burroughs attended Mexico City College, where he studied architecture, Aztec history, and the Mayan codices.

The Burroughs's stay in Mexico was ended in 1951 with the shooting death of Joan Burroughs. For many years after, stories circulated that Burroughs had killed her in cold blood. In 1984, Burroughs finally explained the incident in "Burroughs," a documentary film made about his life. While living in Mexico, he relates, he and his wife had been arguing frequently. Burroughs had been neglecting her for his homosexual companions. At a drinking party with two visiting Army friends, Joan balanced a glass on her head and dared Burroughs to shoot it off in William Tell style. Burroughs's bullet struck her in the forehead and she died instantly. The authorities ruled her death an accident and Burroughs was released without charges. In Queer, a novel written shortly after the accident but not published until 1986, Burroughs dealt indirectly with his wife's death. He states in the book's preface that when he reread the manuscript for publication it had made him feel threatened. It was "painful to an extent I feel it difficult to read, let alone write about. Every word and gesture sets the teeth on edge. The reason for this reluctance becomes clearer as I force myself to look: the book is motivated and formed by an event which is never mentioned, in fact is carefully avoided: the accidental shooting death of my wife."

For several years after his wife's death Burroughs traveled, visiting South America, Morocco, and New York City. He finished his first novel, Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict, in 1951 while living in Morocco. Ginsberg served as his literary agent, placing the manuscript with the New York paperback publisher Ace Books. The book's subject matter caused Ace to publish an edited version, filled with disclaimers, in a double-book format with Maurice Helbrant's novel Narcotic Agent in 1953. Burroughs used the pseudonym William Lee, taken from his mother's maiden name, on the book. The complete, unedited manuscript was finally published under his real name and with the original title, Junky, by Penguin in 1977.

Junkie is a "luridly hyperbolic, quasiautobiographical first- person account of the horrors of drug addiction," as Donald Palumbo writes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Nelson Algren, writing in the Chicago Tribune Book World in 1981, finds that Junkie was "the first American report on the drug experience and remains the most authentic." ln his introduction to the complete edition, Ginsberg cites as Junkie's virtues its "intelligent fact, the clear perception, precise bare language, direct syntax & mind pictures--as well as the enormous sociological grasp, culture- revolutionary attitude toward bureaucracy & law, and the stoic cold- humor'd eye on crime."

Junkie tells the story of William Lee, an "unredeemed" drug addict who becomes involved with the underworld and is forced to travel to avoid the law. Essentially plotless, the novel recounts Lee's withdrawals and cures from four drug addictions and ends with him leaving for the jungles of South America in search of the native drug yage, rumored to give its user telepathic powers. Much of Junkie is Burroughs's own life fictionalized in a pulp confessional style. Burroughs's journey to South America was in search of yage; he, too, travelled widely to escape the law; and his own drug experiences parallel those of Lee. As McNally relates, Junkie "was a generally straightforward description of [Burroughs's] drug life."

Although this first novel is written in a realistic style not found in Burroughs's subsequent books, it introduces many of the concerns later developed in the more experimental works. "Junkie," Skerl explains, "introduces many of Burroughs's continuing themes, characters, images, and settings." Burkholder believes that Junkie "is important to an understanding of [Burroughs's] later work.... Burroughs's literal description of scenes would eventually be inflated to abstract images, ultimately becoming part of the allegorical war of control in later novels.... Later narratives attempt to make the drug experience an archetype for modern man."

Because Junkie was a first novel published by a small paperback publisher, it did not receive much critical attention. Queer, another book written at this time--concerning a homosexual romance in Mexico City--would not find a publisher until 1986. Burroughs's writing career seemed at a standstill. In 1953 he moved to Tangier, Morocco, where he lived until 1958, writing in seclusion. During this time, Burroughs filled over one thousand pages with fragmentary notes about his travels and drug use and with social satire attacking contemporary society. From these notes came his next four novels: Naked Lunch,The Soft Machine,The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express.

By 1957 Burroughs's drug addiction was severely restricting his ability to function normally. He recalls in an article for Evergreen Review: "I lived in one room in the Native Quarter of Tangier. 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." When his habit became too expensive, jumping from thirty grains to sixty grains a day and still not enough, Burroughs realized he had to quit. He travelled to London to undergo a new drug rehabilitation treatment developed by Dr. John Yerby Dent. This method involved using apomorphine, a substance produced by boiling morphine in hydrochloric acid. The apomorphine serves as a kind of metabolic regulator to satisfy the addict's craving for drugs without damaging his health. After undergoing Dent's apomorphine treatments, Burroughs was permanently cured of his addiction.

The Naked Lunch, first published in Paris in 1959 and retitled Naked Lunch in its American edition of 1962, was assembled from the many notes Burroughs wrote while living in Tangier. Several friends, including Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, Sinclair Beiles, and Alan Ansen, helped Burroughs choose the material to use in the book. Kerouac typed most of the manuscript and provided the book's title, which Burroughs explains in the novel's "Atrophied Preface" as the "frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork." Naked Lunch is a series of sketches arranged in a random order. Because of the unstructured nature of the book--further enhanced by the random stacking of manuscript pages on a table at his publisher's office which Burroughs held to be as good an ordering of the contents as any--Naked Lunchhas, Tony Tanner writes in his City of Words: American Fiction, 1950-1970, "no narrative continuity, and no sustained point of view; the separate episodes are not interrelated, they coexist in a particular field of force brought together by the mind of Burroughs which then abandons them." Alvin J. Seltzer, in his study Chaos in the Novel: The Novel in Chaos, finds that in Naked Lunch "all structure is discarded: one can pick up the novel and start his reading anywhere, then go forward, backward or jump around at will.... The novel is set up to break down any rational approach to it, any logical system which attempts to reduce a multilevel experience directed toward our central nervous system."

While Burroughs deals only with drug addiction in Junkie, in Naked Lunch he explores many forms of addiction in human society. As Jerry Bryant writes in The Open Decision, "drug addiction is both a literal example of human imprisonment and thought control and a figurative representation of similar forces at work in human society at large." Burroughs argues that mankind is addicted to such things as image, sex, power, language, and government. As he explains in the novel, "there are many forms of addiction, and I think they all obey basic laws." These addictions are used by those in control to subdue the population. William Lee, the protagonist and Burroughs-surrogate of Junkie, reappears in Naked Lunch as an addict who cures himself only to find that "all of humanity is victimized by some form of addiction. He realizes that the body is a biological trap and that society is run by `control addicts' who use the needs of the body to satisfy their obsession with power. Thus the terms addiction and junk ... are also metaphors for the human condition," Skerl writes.

Because Naked Lunch contains graphic sex and violence, no American or English publisher would at first accept it. The book was first published in Paris in 1959. Though there was no American edition of the book until 1962, and the post office would not allow copies of the Paris edition to be mailed to the United States, milder excerpts from the book appeared in American magazines.

The first American edition of Naked Lunch appeared in 1962 from Grove Press and was met by a lawsuit in Boston on grounds of obscenity. The subsequent trial brought out Ginsberg, Mailer, and other literary figures to speak on behalf of the novel's redeeming social value, the criteria at the time for acceptable literature. Ginsberg described Burroughs's intentions as "moral ... defending the good," while Mailer called him a "religious writer" and Naked Lunch "a vision of how mankind would act if man was totally divorced from eternity." Burroughs did not appear at the trial, but in an article for Evergreen Review he defends "certain passages in the book that have been called pornographic" as being "a tract against Capital Punishment in the manner of Jonathan Swift's Modest Proposal. These sections are intended to reveal capital punishment as the obscene, barbaric and disgusting anachronism that it is." In a landmark decision, a federal court ruled Naked Lunch not obscene. As Skerl relates, "Naked Lunch was a ground-breaking book in helping to eliminate censorship of the printed word in the United States."

The novel also met with opposition from many members of the literary community. John Wain, in a review for New Republic, for example, believes Naked Lunch "is of very small significance. It consists of a prolonged scream of hatred and disgust.... A book like Naked Lunch requires far less talent in the writer, and for that matter less intelligence in the reader than the humblest magazine story or circulating-library novel. From the literary point of view, it is the merest trash, not worth a second glance."

Despite the negative comments and controversy, Naked Lunch has received critical praise from most quarters. It was a national best- seller, made Burroughs's literary reputation, and remains his most widely known book. Robert Peters, writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, calls it "the best American novel of its decade." Jack Kerouac "thought it was wonderful, superseding Genet, De Sade, and Aleister Crowley," according to McNally. Paul Ableman of Spectator judges it to be "the most brilliant satire in English since Gulliver's Travels." And Skerl finds Naked Lunch "a brilliant work.... It significantly contributes to the craft of fiction in subject matter and technique, thus gaining it a permanent place in the history of the novel and the history of the avant-garde."

In his next three novels Burroughs consciously expanded the random structuring used in Naked Lunch by introducing the "cut-up" method of composition. The cut-up is derived from the collage of the visual arts, a technique of combining unrelated elements into a new work. Burroughs learned of the cut-up from the experiments of his friend Brion Gysin. Gysin had been cutting newspaper articles into sections and then rearranging the sections at random, while looking away. The resulting juxtapositions of words intrigued Burroughs. He took the method further, cutting texts down the center and placing unrelated halves together to form new sentences. He cut up the works of other writers, his own writings, newspapers, poems, and magazine articles. From the resulting texts he chose fragments and phrases of the most interest and included them in the completed work. Burroughs also developed the fold-in method in which sections of text are folded in half and juxtapositioned to create new works. Throughout the 1960s he experimented with cut-ups in fiction, film, and tape recordings.

Burroughs tells Platt the importance of the cut-up: "It's closer to the actual facts of perception.... I'm talking about how things are actually perceived by the brain." By coming closer to the way the brain perceives information, the cut-up method also frees the author and reader from the traditional constraints of fiction. Cut-ups, according to Burkholder, realize Burroughs's "notion that we need to escape the constraints of Aristotelian logic and the declarative sentence to free ourselves from the false reality and authorial control that traditional fiction has always presented."

The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express are all written in the cut-up method, utilizing the notes Burroughs took in Tangier. Because of this, the novels are not in "straightforward linear form. The reader must piece [the story] together from flashes, obsessive phrases, and incomplete scenes, struggling through disjointed chronology and abrupt changes of narrators, or cryptic cut-ups," Gerard Cordesse writes in Caliban XII. The three novels continue the story begun in Naked Lunch, forming a tetralogy. The addictions to word, image, power, sex and drugs uncovered by William Lee in Naked Lunch are found in the subsequent novels to be the work of the Nova Mob, a group of aliens who control the earth. The Nova Mob takes on the form of viruses to infect mankind with addictions. Through these addictions they have manipulated Earthlings for three thousand years. "Drugs, sex, and power control the body," Skerl explains, "but `word and image locks' control the mind, that is, conventional patterns of perceiving, thinking, and speaking which determine our interactions with environment and society." Countering the Mob are the Nova Police, who work to regulate man's addictions and use silence and cut-ups to destroy the perception habits enslaving mankind. "The cut-up," Skerl writes, "is a way of exposing word and image controls and thus freeing oneself from them." Bryant sees the Nova Mob as "the symbol of a tyrannical society that flourishes on the destruction of its citizens' independence and integrity.... Only those free of the destructive force of the totalitarian state--be it fascist or welfare--can operate as individuals."

The Soft Machine (the title refers to the human brain) outlines the use of control systems throughout human history, tracing the Nova Mob's influence and focusing in particular on the Mayan civilization. The Mayan priesthood maintained social control through the manipulation of their calendar, which was a word and image system forming the basis of the agricultural, social, and religious life of the people. When Lee, an agent of the Nova Police, travels through time to the Mayan civilization, he restructures the calendar and causes the breakdown of the priests' totalitarian system. Vernon finds The Soft Machine to be Burroughs's "best use of cut-ups" because he establishes "a dynamic rhythm of cohesion and fragmentation which becomes the experience of the novel."

The Ticket That Exploded takes place in several imaginary settings on other worlds. One of these is the Garden of Delights, where the Nova Police exhibit all the control systems used by the Mob. The city of Minraud, ruled by insect creatures who use "mind tapes" to control individuals and a "reality film" to control the actions of their society, is a Burroughs totalitarian fantasy. The book's cut-up sequences are a means of liberation from totalitarianism. And the final novel of the tetralogy, Nova Express, summarizes and condenses the concerns of the previous books while introducing the idea that writing is a powerful tool in resisting control, an idea Burroughs develops in later novels. The science fiction aspect of the tetralogy becomes dominant in Nova Express as giant space battles take place between aliens and Earthlings. The novel ends in a deadlock between the forces of the Nova Mob and Nova Police.

With The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead, published in 1971, and his following books, Burroughs abandoned the extensive cut-ups of his tetralogy in favor of a more conventionally organized narrative. He writes in a popular style and borrows heavily from established commercial genres, suggesting that the elements of popular culture can be used by the writer as tools of liberation. Set in an apocalyptic near-future, The Wild Boys presents a group of homosexual hashish smokers who can travel through time and space and who, through their indifference to the images of society, are beyond social control. The story of their ongoing rebellion is told in a series of eighteen related scenes written in the "simple narrative style of popular fiction, especially the pulp fiction [Burroughs] read in his youth," Skerl explains in the Review of Contemporary Fiction.

Although there is a change in Burroughs's style in The Wild Boys, he is still concerned with personal freedom, the control systems of society, and the efforts to free oneself from social restrictions. These concerns are given a new perspective, however. In The Wild Boys "the tide," Cordesse explains, "has turned: language that was the instrument of nova oppression has become a weapon of liberation." As Skerl writes, The Wild Boys and the novels that follow it express "more hope for the individual and for change through `utopian dreams.'" The novel ends with the narrator attempting to break through the time barrier to join the wild boys in the future.

The characters in The Wild Boys reappear in Cities of the Red Night, a novel interweaving three plot lines set in different times and places. One story follows private detective Clem Snide as he tries to solve a case of ritual murder in the present. Another is set one hundred thousand years in the past where the red virus has broken out in the ancient cities of the Gobi Desert. The primary story is set in the eighteenth century and concerns a group of homosexual pirates who establish a series of libertarian republics in South America and battle the Spanish conquistadors. Each of these narratives is told in the style and language of popular fiction and borrows heavily from the detective, science fiction, and boys' adventure genres.

Critical reaction to Cities of the Red Night was divided. Thomas M. Disch, referring to the novel's graphic violence, comments in the New York Times Book Review that "opium addicts who are sexually aroused by witnessing and/or enacting garrotings and hangings will find `Cities' a veritable gallows of delight." Similarly, Peter S. Prescott of Newsweek finds that "the inspiration behind [ Cities of the Red Night] seems retarded: the masturbatory fantasies of a 12-year-old boy who dreams, as boys will, of plague and violent death, of hiding out with his chums in a secret jungle fort and beating up on the adults around him. For a book that seemed to promise some kind of allegory or at least an apocalyptic vision of the world's end, it is a poor dream to come down to."

But other observers were kinder in their assessments of the novel. Perry Meisel, writing in the New York Times Book Review, calls Cities of the Red Night Burroughs's "best novel," while Steven Shaviro of the Review of Contemporary Fiction defines it as a "homoerotic quest romance, in the great American tradition of Moby Dick." John Tytell, in an article for the American Book Review, finds that "though not as formally explosive as Naked Lunch ,Cities of the Red Night is a powerful book and a hauntingly macabre entertainment." Rechy describes the novel as "Burroughs' masterpiece. In it, the world ends with a bang-and a barely perceived whimper, disguised by the wicked smile of one of the most dazzling magicians of our time."

Speaking of Cities of the Red Night in an article for the New York Times Book Review, Burroughs explains his intentions: "In `Cities of the Red Night' I parachute my characters behind enemy lines in time. Their mission is to correct retroactively certain fatal errors at crucial turning points in human history. I am speaking of biological errors that tend to block man's path to his biological and spiritual destiny in space. I postulate a social structure offering maximum variation of small communes, as opposed to the uniformity imposed by industrialization and overpopulation."

Burroughs's next novel, The Place of Dead Roads, is set in the 1890s and features a protagonist named William Seward Hall, an author of Westerns under the pen name of Kim Carsons. "Born in St. Louis, largely self-taught (teachers hate him), openly homosexual, fascinated by disease, violence, and extreme, often drug-induced, states of mind, the Kim who gradually takes shape in this novel is, we soon realize, very much a fictional version of Burroughs himself," Jay Tolson writes in the Washington Post Book World. This fictionalized Burroughs is, Gerald Nicosia claims in the Chicago Tribune Book World, "a classic grotesque and a quintessential American youth. He is a morbid homosexual who performs elaborate rituals of black magic to curse the prigs who condemn him. But he is also sensitive, honest according to his own code, and highly inventive. He wants most of all to be left alone by those who feel the urge to control his life."

To achieve this freedom, Kim forms an outlaw gang called the Wild Fruits and establishes a string of secret bases across the western frontier. The gang wages a guerrilla war against "straight" society in order to create a utopian society where they can live in peace as homosexuals. Nicosia points out that "Burroughs equates the writer with the warrior in that both must outmaneuver mortality--the warrior with his weapons and military expertise, the writer with his ability to `unwrite' the existing world and replace it with another more congenial to his own nature." To create a new world the writer can only use the memories of his own past--"the place of dead roads"--but he does this "at the peril of becoming trapped by them and repeating his errors, instead of breaking free," Nicosia writes.

As in The Wild Boys and Cities of the Red Night Burroughs uses a popular narrative style in The Place of Dead Roads. Luc Sante of the New York Review of Books finds that in Cities of the Red Night and The Place of Dead Roads Burroughs "has somehow been inspired to emulate the language and themes of such pulp masters as Sax Rohmer, H. P. Lovecraft, Max Brand, and ... Nick Carter." But Meisel makes clear that "despite a largely naturalistic style and an often conventional mode of storytelling, `The Place of Dead Roads' slips and slides in time and place--almost unaccountably until one is again reminded that a transpersonal web links everything together."

Like the earlier wild boys, the Wild Fruits travel through time and space, and like the pirates of Cities of the Red Night, they battle against alien invaders. The story "loops back and forth," writes David Donnell in the Toronto Globe & Mail, "between gay cowboys and social satire, between tech futurism and Mayan altars." The book is structured around a gunfight between Kim Carsons and Mike Chase. The opening scene depicts one version of this gunfight in which both men are shot dead. The novel ends with the same gunfight, but this time only Carsons is killed.

"The first serious gay western," as Donnell describes The Place of Dead Roads, is thought by most reviewers to be a highly personal fiction, although there is disagreement as to its ultimate merit. Anatole Broyard of the New York Times sees little to praise: "For a celebrated author to publish a novel as poor as `The Place of Dead Roads' requires a degree of collusion or encouragement on our part. He must have a certain confidence in our credulity, must assume that bad taste is a good bet, that age cannot wither, nor customs stale the appeal of an established reputation." But Nicosia deems the novel "a moving personal saga as well as a record of revolutionary vision," and Tolson believes the book "would be pretty dull fare were it not for the force of Burroughs' genius, his almost terrifying independence, and his refusal to accept any values but his own."

This consistent independence has won Burroughs a loyal readership despite some critical hostility to his style and themes. Two festivals, the Nova Convention in New York in 1978 and the Final Academy in London in 1982, were organized by admirers as tributes to him. These festivals included films, readings, and panels about his work and attracted devotees from the fields of music, literature, and film. As Tolson acknowledges, "I have met a few [of Burroughs's fans] and know that their regard for the man borders on devotion."

Burroughs has been influential in several areas. In literature, he had a tremendous impact on the Beat writers of the 1950s, particularly his friends Ginsberg and Kerouac. George Dordess explains in the Dictionary of Literary Biography that both Ginsberg and Kerouac "saw in their older friend a fearless, sardonic experimenter with drugs, sex, and crime, as well as a coolly precise student of those analysts of society's ills, Korzybski, Spengler, and Freud. A good teacher, also, Burroughs willingly passed on his information to his younger friends. He even undertook an informal psychoanalysis of both young men and also served as literary critic." Ginsberg's Reality Sandwiches, a book of poems, is directly inspired by Naked Lunch; Burroughs appears as a character in several of Kerouac's novels: as Will Dennison in The Town and the City, as Old Bull Lee in On the Road, as Frank Carmody in The Subterraneans, as Bull Hubbard in Book of Dreams and Desolation Angels, and as Wilson Holmes Hubbard in Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46. Among today's younger experimental writers, too, Burroughs has had a considerable influence. "In their various ways, writers Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe and Ken Kesey all are Burroughs' disciples," Larry Kart writes in the Chicago Tribune Book World.

But it is possibly outside of literature that Burroughs has enjoyed his greatest following. As a prominent member of the Beat writers, Burroughs helped to inspire the hippie and punk movements of the 1960s and 1970s. His Junkie foreshadowed the drug use of the 1960s, and his tetralogy reflected the decade's chaotic rebellion. Naked Lunch, Meisel explains, "not only exemplified the Beat subculture out of which Mr. Burroughs emerged; it also prophesied the wider fate of the American sensibility well into the next two decades. By the time the counterculture of the 1960's succeeded the Beats, license had become the law, and Mr. Burroughs had become a principal avatar of the liberationist esthetic he helped create." The publication of Naked Lunch effectively ended America's last obscenity laws, opening the way for greater freedom in all the arts and allowing explicit sexual material to be legally published in this country. Burroughs "has had considerably greater cultural impact than the extent of his present readership might indicate," Bruce Cook writes in the Detroit News. "It would not be an overstatement to say that he is one of the secret shapers of American culture--such as it is today."

"The master's influence," Kart writes, "also has been felt in the world of rock." The term "heavy metal," a name for a type of rock and roll, comes from Naked Lunch. The group Steely Dan borrowed their name from Burroughs's writings. Such groups as the Rolling Stones have written songs about his characters, while David Bowie and Patti Smith admit to using the cut-up method to compose their songs. Burroughs even hit the British record charts with his "Nothing Here but the Recordings," an album containing readings from his work and some cut-up tape recorder experiments. As a New York Times writer sums up, "There can be no doubt that Mr. Burroughs has been one of the principal literary influences on rock music." Sante believes that "youth culture since the Sixties has abounded in allusions to his work the way earlier generations drew on Shakespeare or the Bible."

Though his influence in literature and popular culture has been substantial, Burroughs has not yet achieved full academic acceptance. His controversial cut-up method and his graphic writing about drug use and homosexuality have made Burroughs difficult for some observers to evaluate objectively. Seymour Krim of the Washington Post Book World points out that one problem with Burroughs's writing is its refusal to fulfill a reader's preconceptions. "Many a decent-minded reader," Krim writes, "is going to give up out of a feeling of bewilderment and impotence because he expects to be spoon-fed in the grand American custom. But Burroughs doesn't make these concessions." As Norman Snider writes in the Toronto Globe & Mail, "Burroughs is not the sort of writer whose reputation will ever settle into general and genial acceptance. His work will always have its passionate detractors and ferocious admirers."

Alfred Kazin of the New York Times Book Review, while allowing that Burroughs "is indeed a serious man and a considerable writer," nevertheless feels that "his books are not really books, they are compositions that astonish, then pall. They are subjective experiences brought into the world for the hell of it and by the excitement of whatever happens to be present to Burroughs's consciousness when he writes." Sante, too, is of a mixed opinion as to Burroughs's stature. He calls Naked Lunch "still his best.... it remains a milestone of a kind, going further than any book in plumbing the untouchable aspects of American life." But Sante also believes that Burroughs "shot his wad with this volume."

Part of the resistance to Burroughs's work is perhaps explained by Bruce Cook in his book The Beat Generation. Cook gives his opinion that Burroughs "is a very considerable prose artist--intellectually accomplished, technically innovative," and then allows that, if "given different subject matter, [Burroughs] would have enormous appeal to academic critics." Krim sees the subjective nature of Burroughs's work as another possible drawback to its wide acceptance. Burroughs, Krim writes, "gives the very definite impression that he is including us in a private ceremonial obsession over which he has little control.... We feel that Burroughs is composing in a trance that removes his work from what we ordinarily think of as `fiction' or even art.' It's as if we had gotten hold of a black ticket to his unconscious, and anyone who makes the trip will see sights and feel feelings that are unique and mind-bending.... Totting it all up is of course another, highly subjective story."

But a number of critics praise Burroughs's innovative prose and his exploration of new literary terrain. Harry Marten, for example, writes in the New York Times Book Review that Burroughs "has been mixing the satirist's impulse toward invective with the cartoonist's relish for exaggerated gesture, the collage artist's penchant for radical juxtapositions with the slam-bang pace of the carnival barker. In the process, he has mapped a grotesque modern landscape of disintegration whose violence and vulgarity is laced with manic humor." Anthony Burgess, speaking of the tetralogy in his The Novel Now: A Guide to Contemporary Fiction, finds Burroughs's style innovative and leading to a "new medium ... a medium totally fantastic, spaceless, timeless, in which the normal sentence is fractured, the cosmic tries to push its way through bawdry, and the author shakes the reader as a dog shakes a rat." Speaking to the Edinburgh International Writer's Conference, Mailer proclaimed Burroughs as "the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius."

After living abroad for many years Burroughs returned to the United States in 1973, living for a time in New York City and then moving to rural Kansas. In the 1970s he began to give public readings from his work, and has since given over one hundred and fifty readings in the United States, Canada, and in several European countries. He has also read his work on the "Saturday Night Live" television program. "These readings," Burroughs explained, "are performances carefully rehearsed. I am, despite previous disclaimers, an entertainer, in fact a stand-up comic." Through his readings Burroughs's distinctive persona--a gaunt figure dressed impeccably in a dark suit--has become familiar to many of his readers. He possesses a "sad, nasty drawl, a voice that goes well with his face, which has the odd quality of being soft and haggard at the same time, a face that can writhe with tics, then gaze with reptilian stillness," Allen writes. Platt recalls that Burroughs's "complexion is ghostly pale; he peers out into daylight like the caretaker for a mausoleum." Sante likens Burroughs to "the dangerous figure in a worn business outfit who haunts schoolyards and mutters vague fragments about planetary conspiracy."

Speaking of his writing, Burroughs said he has been deeply influenced by the authors Denton Welch, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Louis- Ferdinand Celine, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Arthur Rimbaud, and Saint-John Perse. As to his literary intentions, Burroughs explains: "My purpose in writing any book is to do the best job of writing I can do. And that's it."

In 2000, Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs was published. The book covered the months from November 14, 1996 to August 1, 1997 (the day before his death). That same year, the book Conversations with William S. Burroughs, a collection of 22 interviews spanning 35 years was published. Edited by Allen Hibbard, the book features interviews of Burroughs by such people as Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso.

Associated Works

The Naked Lunch (Novel)

Historical Context

The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (1914-)
At the time of Burrough's birth:
Woodrow Wilson was president of the United States
Booth Tarkington's Penrod published
Doublemint chewing gum introduced
Robert Frost's North of Boston published
The first "Mother's Day" in U.S. was proclaimed
The times:
1914-1918: World War I
1930-1960: Modernist Period in American literature
1939-1945: World War II
1950-1953: Korean War
1960-present: Postmodernist Period in American literature
1957-1975: Vietnam War
Burrough's contemporaries:
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) American poet
Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) American playwright
Albert Camus (1913-1960) French writer
Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) Welsh poet
Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) American writer
Frank Sinatra (1915-) American singer/actor
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-) American poet
Selected world events:
1921: Band-Aid brand adhesive bandages introduced
1927: Charles Lindbergh completed non-stop solo transatlantic flight
1929: U.S. Stock Market crash started Great Depression
1945: Germany surrendered to Allied forces
1949: George Orwell's 1984 published
1957: Electric watch introduced by Hamilton Watch Co.
1963: President John F. Kennedy assassinated in Dallas
1975: William Gaddis' JR published
1988: Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses published