William S. Burroughs  (1994 - 1997)

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Gentleman Junkie : The Life and Legacy of William S. Burroughs by Graham Caveney  

There have been several solid conventional biographies of William S. Burroughs (1914-1997), and this imaginative consideration of his "life and legacy" does not seek to replace them. Instead, British scholar Graham Caveney concentrates on Burroughs as a cultural phenomenon whose unsettling ability to depict personal degradation with modernist detachment first awed contemporaries in the beat generation and continued through the 1990s to inspire artists as diverse as grunge rocker Kurt Cobain, painter Keith Haring, and film director David Cronenberg. Even before Naked Lunch became a literary and legal cause célèbre--the book was ultimately judged not obscene in a landmark 1966 court decision--Burroughs was a legend in avant-garde circles for his epic drug use, unabashed homosexuality, and adventurous prose. In later years he became an elder statesman of the counterculture, an icon of excesses survived, revered for his unflinching portraits of the existential abyss. Caveney astutely examines the appeal for Americans of this complex figure whose highly experimental work had more in common with that of such Europeans as Jean Genet than with pals like Allen Ginsberg. The book's design reflects its genre-bending aspirations: Caveney's text jostles against reproductions of photos, newspaper clippings, and other documents, all of it laid out on pages colored red, orange, yellow, and blue. Words, images, and colors form an inventive whole that pays fitting tribute to a man who lived entirely by his own rules. --Wendy Smith

The Beat Hotel : Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1958-1963 by Barry Miles

The Beat Hotel has been closed for nearly forty years. But for a brief period --from just after the publication of Howl in 1957 until the hotel was sold, in 1963 -- it was home to Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin, Peter Orlovsky, Harold Norse, and a host of other luminaries of the Beat Generation. Now, Barry Miles -- the acclaimed author of many books on the Beats and a long-time friend of many of them -- vividly excavates this remarkable period and restores it to a historical picture that has, until now, been skewed in favor of the two coasts of America. A cheap rooming house on the bohemian Left Bank, the Beat Hotel was inhabited mostly by writers and artists, and its communal atmosphere spurred the Beats to incredible heights of creativity. Its inhabitants followed the Howl obscenity trial, and they corresponded with Jack Kerouac as On the Road was taking off. There Ginsberg began "Kaddish" and wrote "To Aunt Rose," "At Apollinaire's Grave," and "The Lion for Real" and Corso developed the mature voice of The Happy Birthday of Death. The Beat Hotel is where the Cut-up method was invented, and where Burroughs finished and published Naked Lunch and the Cut-up novels. From a party where Ginsberg and Corso drunkenly accosted Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, to an awestruck audience with Louis-Ferdinand Celine a year before he died; from a drug-addled party on a Cannes houseboat with Errol Flynn and John Huston, to Burroughs's near arrest as a heroin dealer; mischief, inspiration, and madness followed the Beats wherever they went. Based on firsthand accounts from diaries, letters, and many original interviews, The Beat Hotel is an intimate look at a crucial period for some of the twentieth century's most enduring and daring writers.

Burroughs, William S. (1914-1997)

WRITER, ACTOR

Burroughs studied English at Harvard University and medicine at the University of Vienna and took many jobs before devoting himself to the experimental writing and drug use as part of what would later be known as the Beat Generation.

In 1938 Burroughs married Ilse Klapper in order to get a U.S. visa and avoid being sent back to Nazi Germany from Yugoslavia. Back in the United States, he worked in advertising, at a detective firm and as an insect exterminator before moving to New York City where he met Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac - two years later the three became roommates.

Burroughs had affairs with both men and women. His most serious relationship was with Joan Vollmer whom he accidentally shot in the head and killed performing a "William Tell act" at a party.

The William S. Burroughs Files

An electronic reference guide to works of William Seward Burroughs, his literary works, recordings, film, video appearances, samples, and other publications. 

William S. Burroughs

The Last Words of Dr. Benway in Memoriam to William S. Burroughs

Excerpt:

William Burroughs was born on February 5, 1914, in St. Louis, Missouri, the grandson of the inventor of the Burroughs adding machine. After his graduation from Harvard, he lived in Chicago and New York on an income of two hundred dollars a month from his parents. He met Lucien Carr and Allen Ginsberg in New York City around Christmas 1943 shortly after Ginsberg began studying at Columbia, and Burroughs impressed them with his erudition, as well as his sardonic humor and reserved poise. Older than the others in the group, he took on the role of teacher, encouraging Kerouac and Ginsberg in their attempts to write fiction and poetry...

Salon J.G. Ballard on William S. Burroughs' Naked Truth

By Richard Kadrey and Suzanne Stefanac

Excerpt:

William Burroughs' raw-boned figure haunted us long before his death. For nearly half a century, he infected our literature, seeding it with his obsessions, suspicions and passions. In his brutal honesty, we began to learn something new about truth and humor and maybe even love.

Of the many authors who have acknowledged his influence, few have been as unflinching or provocative as J.G. Ballard. From the chromey auto-eroticism of "Crash" to the surrendered innocence of "Empire of the Sun," Ballard has refined a style that cuts through the moralism and sentimentality that blunt so much contemporary writing...

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