Burroughs, William S.

views updated

William S. Burroughs

Personal

Full name William Seward Burroughs; born February 5, 1914, in St. Louis, MO; died of a heart attack, August 2, 1997, in Lawrence, KS; son of Mortimer P. (a businessman) and Laura (Lee) Burroughs; married Ilse Herzfeld Klapper, 1937 (divorced, 1946); married Joan Vollmer, January 17, 1946 (died September 7, 1951, of an accidental gunshot wound); children: (second marriage) William Seward, Jr. (died March 3, 1981). Education: Harvard University, A.B., 1936, graduate study, 1938; attended University of Vienna, 1937, and Mexico City College, 1949-50.

Career

Writer. Advertising copywriter in New York City, early 1940s; has also worked as bartender, exterminator, and private detective. Appeared in films, including Bill and Tony, 1962; Towers Open Fire, 1963; The Cut-Ups, 1965; Opium Jones, 1967; Prologue, 1970; Underground and Emigrants, 1976; Energy and How to Get It, 1981; Poetry in Motion, 1982; Cooked Diamonds, 1982; Kerouac, 1983; Burroughs, 1983; This Song for Jack, 1983; Decoder, 1984; What Happened to Kerouac?, 1985; It Don't Pay to Be an Honest Citizen, 1985; Home of the Brave, 1986; William S. Burroughs: Commissioner of Sewers, 1986; The Beat Generation: An American Dream, 1987; Bloodhounds on Broadway, 1989; Drugstore Cowboy, 1989; Heavy Petting, 1989; Rub Out the Word, 1989; Twister, 1989; A Thanksgiving Prayer, 1990; Naked Making Lunch, 1992; The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg, 1993; Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, 1993; Glitterbug, 1993; A Junky's Christmas, 1994; Ah Pook Is Here, 1994; and Ghosts at No. 9. Made appearances in music videos. Military service: U.S. Army, 1942.

Awards, Honors

National Institute of Arts and Letters and American Academy, award in literature, 1975, named member, 1983; the Nova Convention, a four-day arts festival held in New York city in 1978, and the Final Academy, held in London in 1982, were organized as tributes to Burroughs.

Writings

NOVELS

(Under pseudonym William Lee) Junkie: The Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (bound with Narcotic Agent by Maurice Helbrant), Ace Books (New York, NY), 1953, published separately under name William S. Burroughs, 1964, unexpurgated edition published as Junky, Penguin (New York, NY), 1977.

The Naked Lunch (also see below), Olympia Press (Paris, France), 1959, published as Naked Lunch, Grove (New York, NY), 1962, restored text edition, 2001.

The Soft Machine (also see below), Olympia Press (Paris, France), 1961, revised edition, Grove (New York, NY), 1966.

The Ticket That Exploded (also see below), Olympia Press (Paris, France), 1962, revised edition, Grove (New York, NY), 1967.

Dead Fingers Talk (contains excerpts from NakedLunch, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded), Calder/Olympia Press (Paris, France), 1963.

Nova Express (also see below), Grove (New York, NY), 1964.

The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (also see below), Grove (New York, NY), 1971, revised edition, Calder (London, England), 1979.

Exterminator! Viking/Seaver (New York, NY), 1973.

Port of Saints, Covent Garden Press (London, England), 1973, Blue Wind Press (Berkeley, CA), 1979.

Short Novels, Calder (London, England), 1978. Blade Runner: A Movie, Blue Wind Press (Berkeley, CA), 1979.

The Soft Machine, Nova Express [and] The Wild Boys, Grove (New York, NY), 1980.

Cities of the Red Night, Holt (New York, NY), 1981.

The Place of Dead Roads, Holt (New York, NY), 1984.

Queer, Viking (New York, NY), 1986.

The Western Lands, Viking (New York, NY), 1987.

Interzone, edited by James Grauerholz, Viking (New York, NY), 1989.

Also author, with Jack Kerouac, of unpublished novel And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks.

OTHER

(With Brion Gysin) The Exterminator, Auerhaun Press (San Francisco, CA), 1960.

(With Brion Gysin, Sinclair Beiles, and Gregory Corso) Minutes to Go (poems), Two Cities Editions (Paris, France), 1960, Beach Books, 1968.

(With Allen Ginsberg) The Yage Letters, City Lights (San Francisco, CA), 1963.

Takis (exhibition catalog), [New York, NY], 1963.

(Under pseudonym Willy Lee) Roosevelt after Inauguration, F——You Press, 1964, published as Roosevelt after Inauguration and Other Atrocities, City Lights (San Francisco, CA), 1979.

Valentine's Day Reading, American Theatre for Poets, 1965.

The White Subway (also see below), Aloes Books (London, England), 1965.

Health Bulletin: APO:33: A Metabolic Regulator, F——You Press, 1965, published as APO:33: A Report on the Synthesis of the Apomorphine Formula, Beach Books, 1966.

(With Lee Harwood) Darayt, Lovebooks (London, England), 1965.

Time (poems), "C" Press, 1965.

(With Claude Pelieu and Carl Weissner) So WhoOwns Death TV? Beach Book Texts and Documents, 1967.

They Do Not Always Remember, Delacorte (New York, NY), 1968.

(Author of preface) Jeff Nuttall, Pig, Fulcrum Press (London, England), 1969.

Ali's Smile, Unicorn Books (New York, NY), 1969. The Dead Star, Nova Broadcast Press (San Francisco, CA.), 1969.

Entretiens avec William Burroughs, Editions Pierre Belfond (Paris, France), 1969, translation published as The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs, Grove (New York, NY), 1970, new edition, 1974.

(With Carl Weissner) The Braille Film, Nova Broadcast Press (San Francisco, CA.), 1970.

(With Brion Gysin) Third Mind, Grove (New York, NY), 1970.

The Last Words of Dutch Schultz: A Fiction in the Form of a Film Script, Cape Goliard Press (London, England), 1970, Viking/Seaver (New York, NY), 1975.

(With Claude Pelieu) Jack Kerouac (in French), L'Herne (Paris, France), 1971.

Electronic Revolution (also see below), Blackmoor Head Press (Cambridge, England), 1971.

(With Brion Gysin and Ian Somerville) Brion GysinLet the Mice In, Something Else Press (New York, NY), 1973.

Mayfair Academy Series More or Less, Urgency Press Rip-Off, 1973.

The Book of Breething (also see below), OU Press (Ingatestone, England), 1974, Blue Wind Press (Berkeley, CA), 1975, 2nd edition, 1980.

(With Charles Gatewood) Sidetripping, Strawberry Hill (San Francisco, CA), 1975.

(With Eric Mottram) Snack: Two Tape Transcripts, Aloes Books (London, England), 1975.

Cobblestone Gardens (also see below), Cherry Valley (Wheaton, MD), 1976.

The Retreat Diaries (also see below), City Moon (New York, NY), 1976.

(Author of text) 23 Skidoo, first produced in New York, NY, at the Washington Square Methodist Church, April, 1978.

Naked Scientology, Expanded Media Editions (Bonn, Germany), 1978.

Doctor Benway: A Variant Passage from "The NakedLunch," Bradford Morrow (Santa Barbara, CA), 1979.

Ah Pook Is Here and Other Texts: The Book of Breething,Electronic Revolution, Calder (London, England), 1979.

Early Routines, Cadmus Editions (Santa Barbara, CA), 1981.

Letters to Allen Ginsberg, 1953-1957, Full Court Press (New York, NY), 1981.

A William Burroughs Reader, Pan Books (London, England), 1982.

The Burroughs File (includes The White Subway,Cobblestone Gardens, and The Retreat Diaries), City Lights (San Francisco, CA), 1984.

The Adding Machine: Collected Essays, Calder (London, England), 1985. (With Keith Haring) Apocalypse (catalog), George Mulder Fine Arts (New York, NY), 1988.

Tornado Alley, Cherry Valley Editions (Cherry Valley, NY), 1988.

William S. Burroughs: Paintings, Galerie Carzaniga + Ueker (Basel, Switzerland), 1989.

William S. Burroughs: Exposition, 23 mars/21 avril1990, Galerie K. Paris, Le Galerie (Paris, France), 1990.

Ghost of Chance, illustrated by George Condo, Library Fellows of the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), 1991.

The Cat Inside, Viking (New York, NY), 1992.

Everything Is Permitted: The Making of "Naked Lunch," edited by Ira Silverberg, Grove Weidenfeld (New York, NY), 1992.

The Letters of William S. Burroughs: 1945-1959, edited and with an introduction by Oliver Harris, Viking (New York, NY), 1994.

My Education: A Book of Dreams, Viking (New York, NY), 1995.

Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, Autonomedia, 1997.

(With James Grauerholz and Ira Silverberg) WordVirus: The William S. Burroughs Reader, Grove (New York, NY), 1998.

My Kind of Angel: i.m. William Burroughs, edited by Rupert Loydell, Stride (Exeter, Devon, England), 1998.

Conversations with William S. Burroughs, edited by Allen Hibbard, University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, MS), 1999.

Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs, edited by James Grauerholz, Grove (New York, NY), 2000.

Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S.Burroughs, 1960-1997, edited by Sylvre Lotringer, Semiotext(e), 2000.

Also author, with Claude Pelieu and Carl Weissner, of Fernseh-Tuberkulose, 1969, and of films, with Gysin, Towers Open Fire, 1963, with Antony Balch, Bill and Tony, 1966, and of The Cut-Ups. Contributor to books, including A Casebook on the Beat, edited by Thomas Parkinson, Crowell, 1961, and The Final Academy: Statements of a Kind, edited by Robert Fly, Final Academy, 1982. Also a contributor to Grand Street 59: Time (January 1997).

RECORDINGS

Call Me Burroughs, English Bookshop, 1965.

William S. Burroughs/John Giorno, Giorno Poetry Systems, 1975.

You're the Man I Want to Share My Money With, Giorno Poetry Systems, 1981.

Nothing Here Now but the Recordings, Industrial Records, 1981.

Break Through in Grey Room, Sub Rosa, 1987.

Dead City Radio, Island Records, 1990.

(And narrator) A Thanksgiving Prayer, Island Records, 1990.

(With Kurt Cobain) "'The Priest' They Called Him," Tim/Kerr Records, 1993.

Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales, Island Red Label, 1993.

(With Tom Waits) The Black Rider, Island Records, 1993.

Best of William Burroughs from Giorno Poetry Systems, Mouth Almighty/Mercury, 1998.

The Name Is Burroughs: A Program of Readings from the Work of William S. Burroughs, selected and read by Teman Treadway, Library of Congress (Washington, DC), 1998.

Contributor to Laurie Anderson: Mister Heartbreak, Warner Brothers, 1984. Also composer of song "Old Lady Sloan," recorded by Mortal Micronotz on the album The Mortal Micronotz, Fresh Sounds, 1982; and to Revolutions per Minute (The Art Record), Ronald Feldmann Fine Arts, 1982, and Life Is a Killer, Giorno Poetry Systems.

Adaptations

Burroughs's novel Naked Lunch was adapted for a film directed by David Cronenberg, produced by Jeremy Thomas, and released by Twentieth Century-Fox in 1991.

Sidelights

Called "one of the most enthralling personalities in American literature" by Alan Ansen in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, writer, poet, painter, performer, and rebel William S. Burroughs was a founder of the Beat Generation, a literary artistic movement that challenged the predominant middle-class beliefs of 1950s America. Referred to as a "literary outlaw" by his biographer, Ted Morgan, Burroughs was a distinct outsider not only to the bourgeois world which he so satirized, but even in artistic circles. His life was punctuated with the exclamation marks of his early drug addiction, the killing of his second wife, and his homosexuality. As Leon Lewis noted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, however, "the legend surrounding Burroughs's life has tended to deflect attention from his actual accomplishments while intertwining the life of the man with his work in ways that require knowledge of both to make either intelligible. Lewis further commented, "[Burroughs's] influence on musicians, filmmakers, computer hackers, and others with antiestablishment agendas has frequently overshadowed his importance as a writer. However, his employment of a Joycean stream-of-consciousness narrative; his prefiguring of postmodernism in his fusion of disparate modes; his development of a novel that does not depend on traditional methods of shaping plot, characters, and dialogue; and his creation of a distinctly singular voice that combines several strains of American speech while retaining its own characteristic qualities should ensure his place in twentieth-century literature

Vince Passaro noted in Harper's magazine shortly after Burroughs's death in 1997, that "such disturbing life details were little remembered" at the time of the writer's passing, as indeed were his actual accomplishments. Instead, according to Passaro, Burroughs "had been commercially morphed into the grand old man of American freakdom, the last living beatnik . . . , a cool face in a Nike ad, and a background vocalist on Tom Waits and Laurie Anderson records." This transformation was, however, far from the truth of Burroughs's life, according to Passaro: "In reality . . . Burroughs was a dangerous man, not only an actual killer but a theoretician of crime and resistance, someone who strove to forge the unspeakable into an art form. With his passing, the American literary world lost more than the thin, neatly dressed Beat icon that the mainstream obituaries described; it lost the last of its revolutionary modernists." Described by a critic for Publishers Weekly as a "crusty American expatriate junkie who looked like an insurance-company middle manager," Burroughs left behind an impressive list of achievements in a number of artistic forms. The author of over a dozen novels, including the acclaimed Naked Lunch, Queer, Junkie, The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, Nova Express, The Wild Boys, and Cities of the Red Night, he also wrote nonfiction, including a volume of letters that helps define the middle decades of the twentieth century. In addition to these works, he penned short stories and film scripts, recorded numerous readings of his own work, appeared in music videos and movies, and worked for many years toward the end of his life as a painter.

Burroughs's fiction is noted for its nonlinear format, unresolved endings, and abrupt cuts and transitions. He also pioneered a genre he called "cut-ups," in which he interleaved his own text with random cuttings from newspapers and other media. As Jim Marks noted in Lambda Book Report, Burroughs's novels are a "weird mix of paranoia, violence, drug use and teenage homoerotic sexual fantasy." Indeed, for Marks, such a sexual fantasy "is the predominant element in Burroughs' writing." Others, including George Gessert, writing in Leonardo, find that Burroughs's writing owes less to literary influences such as James Joyce and Henry Miller than they do to the world of music and art. "To me," wrote Gessert, "[Burroughs's] novels of the late 1950s and 1960s do not recall Finnegan's Wake or The Tropic of Cancer so much as improvisational jazz and abstract expressionism." Gessert went on to note that, "like [the abstract expressionist painter Jackson] Pollock, who abandoned the concern for a permanent art, Burroughs saw permanence in literature as inappropriate to an age of instant annihilation, and he tried to create an emergency literature for breakthrough into a new culture."

Middle-Class Roots

It is ironic that such a rebellious, pioneering spirit came out of such a conventional upbringing. The grandson of the inventor of the adding machine, Burroughs was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1914. His family was intensely establishment. In addition to the fortune (lost by 1929) gained by the adding machine that bears the family name, Burroughs's mother also came from a staid, conservative background, the Lee family, which counted the Confederate general Robert E. Lee among its forebears. Laura Lee Burroughs's uncle helped to found the use of public relations by corporate America to battle the labor movement; she was the daughter of a Methodist minister and herself was well known for her three books on flower arranging. Burroughs's father, Mortimer P. Burroughs, was a gentleman who lived off the fortune brought in by his father's invention; he was a noted amateur landscape gardener and later, after the loss of much of the family money in the stock market crash of 1929, ran a gift and art shop called Cobblestone Gardens. An older brother was a Princeton University graduate and an architect who worked his entire life for General Electric.

William Seward Burroughs was, however, cut out for a different path in life. He dropped out of his private boys' school in New Mexico two months before graduation because of depression brought on by rejection by another boy. The Los Alamos Ranch School was subsequently purchased by the U.S. government and turned into a research site for the building of the first atomic bomb. Jennie Skerl noted in Dictionary of Literary Biography that "as a youth Burroughs says he found himself 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, not the sole cause. Timid and solitary, he turned to extensive reading for solace and dreamed of becoming a writer." He began writing in his youth, but gave it up as a teenager, dismayed that he was unable to reveal the intimate details of his life, even in the pages of his diary. He would not begin writing again until 1938, and then only in a piecemeal manner.

Attending Harvard University in the early 1930s, Burroughs majored in English and was remembered by other students primarily for the fact that he kept a live ferret in his room. Graduating in 1936, he went to Vienna, Austria, for a time, studying medicine and psychoanalysis. There he married Ilse Herzfeld Klapper, a union motivated not out of love but from a desire to help her emigrate from a Europe increasingly dominated by Adolf Hitler and the German Nazis. The couple divorced formally in 1946. Back in the United States, Burroughs worked at a variety of jobs, from an advertising copywriter to exterminator. For a time in 1938 he began writing again, collaborating with a friend, Kells Evins, on hard-boiled detective yarns which did not sell to the magazine market. During this time, despite a lack of success in placing his work, Burroughs began developing his pulp fiction and factual style as well as one of the characters that would make repeated appearances in his later work, Dr. Benway. Drafted into the army with the onset of World War II, Burroughs quickly received a disability discharge when it was learned that he had spent time in a mental hospital for slicing off part of a finger.

These years of aimless drifting began to take more shape when he moved to New York and enrolled at Columbia University. There he met two younger men, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, with whom he would establish a lasting connection. These three ultimately laid down the foundations of the Beat movement with its critical view of corporate America. Burroughs also completed his search for the ultimate outsider experience in America: in 1944 he became a morphine addict. Shortly thereafter, he met Joan Vollmer, a friend of Kerouac's girlfriend. He and Vollmer would, despite Burroughs's homosexuality, ultimately marry and have a son, William Burroughs II.

In many ways Burroughs was a teacher to Ginsberg and Kerouac, who were about a decade younger and less experienced in the world and in literature. He introduced them to the outlaw culture he had discovered around Times Square in New York, and
the pushers who supplied him with his drugs. But the younger men also influenced Burroughs; it was Kerouac who finally convinced the older man to start writing down his own life, especially his drug experiences.

A Literary Outlaw

From the middle of the 1940s to the end of the 1950s addiction was a way of life for Burroughs. His life was in fact almost totally determined by his drug use, both the availability of drugs and the legal problems ensuing because of his addiction. He fled New York with Vollmer to avoid a drug arrest, settling in Texas for a time. Then, after a spell in a drug rehabilitation center in Kentucky, he returned to Texas and his drug habit. He left Texas for Louisiana because of an arrest for drunken driving. In Louisiana he was arrested for possession of drugs and illegal firearms and escaped to Mexico City to avoid conviction. There, supported by a small allowance from his family, he began taking classes at the Mexico City University, and also continued with his drug habit in an environment where drugs were easier to find.

By 1950 he had begun work on his first novel, Junkie: The Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict. His time in Mexico, however, was cut short by domestic tragedy. Drinking heavily one day, Burroughs and his wife played a deadly game with a handgun. She placed a glass of gin on her head and he attempted to shoot it, like William Tell and the apple. In this case, however, he missed. The bullet struck Joan in the forehead and killed her instantly. The killing was finally ruled an accident, but Burroughs had to leave Mexico. His son, Billy, was sent to live with his paternal grandparents and Burroughs set off on a new round of travels, through South America in search of a legendary drug, yage, and then on to Tangier, Morocco, where young men and drugs were plentiful. Here he settled for several years. The death of his wife, however, left its mark on Burroughs. As he wrote in the novel Queer, the death "brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out."

Meanwhile, Burroughs's first novel, Junkie, appeared in 1953, and was largely ignored by critics. As Skerl noted, however, the novel "lays the groundwork for later novels and is itself a complex work that deserves more attention." Many of the characters and themes of Burroughs's later work make their first appearance here. The book records the experiences of a drug addict or junkie, William Lee, who is a stand in for Burroughs himself. Critics later pointed out the significance of the use of the name "Lee," that of his mother's conservative family. But Bill Lee, Burroughs's protagonist, is a rebel, a seeker of adventure and of a life lived outside of traditional moral structures and strictures. Addiction, according to Burroughs, is what sets Lee free from the conventional social rules. In this debut novel Burroughs also experiments with new literary forms, imitating the deadpan style of the pulp magazines.

In Tangier Burroughs was no less controlled by his addiction, but he still managed to write about a thousand pages of notes that he would later fashion into his rambling, nonlinear novels. He began to work on a fictional device he called the "routine," or "satirical fantasy improvised from a factual base," as Skerl described the technique. His Tangier notes were full of such routines, and they began to form the core of his fictional technique. From 1953 to 1959 there were no new publications, only these copious notes. However, by 1957 his drug habit had become so extreme that he again sought help, this time in London where he underwent what was known as the apomorphine cure. The treatment was successful, though Burroughs relapsed a few times. Yet by 1959 Burroughs was completely cured of his addiction to morphine and could now put the finishing touches on Naked Lunch, the novel by which he is best know.

A Literary Explosion

Like Junkie, Naked Lunch is on one level the record of a man's addiction to opiates. The book traces the effects of this addiction and its treatment and cure by the apomorphine treatment. "On the literal level the novel can be seen as the disjointed memories and hallucinations of withdrawal," according to Skerl. Again narrated by Bill Lee, the book opens with a first section that more or less looks at Burroughs's own life of addiction as seen in Junkie, and his ultimate settling in Tangier. But the book moves into fantasy in other sections in which Tangier is changed into the dystopic "Interzone," and social satire comes to the fore as does Burroughs's own form of pop philosophy and science. Routines or sketches are laid out in random order, thus prohibiting any sense of narrative continuity or sense of consistent point of view. It is possible, as more than one critic has mentioned, to pick up the novel and begin anywhere, or jump backward or forward at will. It is also filled with powerful sexual and bodily descriptions, strong language that kept the book from being published initially in the United States.

Among the myriad themes explored in the novel is that of control. As Lewis observed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "Burroughs investigates the methods that people in positions of power or dependency use to influence others through the exertion of psychological, social, political, and sexual pressures." Thus he takes on the establishment through the fictional form of the three political parties of Interzone: the Liquefactionists, the Divisionists, and the Senders. The leaders of these parties are all "control addicts," as Burroughs describes them in the novel. The only force for good against these evil parasitic controllers is the radical Factualist party. Agent Bill Lee is a factualist, fighting his odd fight for human freedom by revealing the facts and the way things really are.

It was not this subversive message, though, that caused legal and critical problems for the book. Lewis pointed out that "most of the criticism directed at Naked Lunch by literary critics and legal authorities has focused on Burroughs's graphic presentation of coarse physical detail and his apparent lack of a clear moral base in his portrayal of deviant social activities." But as Lewis went on to note," Burroughs's intentions, however, are neither to endorse nor directly to condemn the participants depicted in his routines, utilizing instead the shocking force of the portrayals as a means of undermining easy or habitual responses so that conventional judgment might be replaced by a new or deeper understanding of fundamental causes. The morality of his work is derived from his exploration of what he calls 'The Algebra of Need'—a phrase pointing toward the cynical exploitation of human desperation that might be understood in terms of the root meaning of algebra."

Published in Paris in 1959, the novel was finally brought out by Grove Press in the United States in 1962. Together with Ginsberg's epic poem, Howl, published in 1956, and Kerouac's novel On the Road, published in 1957, Burroughs's Naked Lunch forms a triumvirate of works proclaiming the Beat ethos of disaffection and alienation. It earned a champion in the writer Mary McCarthy, who compared Naked Lunch to Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, another book initially thought obscene. Other writers also rallied around Burroughs when Naked Lunch twice faced obscenity charges in the early 1960s and twice won, helping to break the stranglehold such laws had on creativity. Writing more than three decades later, Benjamin Weissman noted in the Los Angeles Times Book Review that with publication of Naked Lunch, Burroughs "locked himself and his readers into a blasted, playful zone, a sort of Jonathan Swiftmeets-Marquis de Sade 'humanoidspeak.'" Weissman further commented that the "voice of Burroughs' prose is a profound and prophetic dementia that continually blows people away, and like all great writing it disturbed a lot of people." For Weissman, this prose was a "surreal maelstrom of sex, violence and drugs all swirled together in a levelheaded cowboy vernacular." Alternately praised and reviled upon publication, Naked Lunch and Burroughs have since been inducted into the canon of American literature. Skerl concluded that the novel is a "brilliant work deserving of the critical attention it has received. 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 avantgarde."

This world of control addicts and surreal exploration of the modern condition found further definition in the trilogy of novels that followed Naked Lunch: The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express. "In these books," according to Passaro, "Burroughs . . . developed an underground politics of shamanistic resistance to 1950s U.S. triumphalism." The author continued to draw on the notes and routines he had written in Tangier, but now threw in a new technique for making such surreal sketches even more random. Influenced by the "cut-up" technique of his friend and painter Brion Gysin—which derived from the Dada art movement of the 1910s and 1920s—Burroughs began cutting up his passages of prose and randomly inserting cuttings from other writers and media to create a collage effect, further accentuating the accidental nature of the narratives. This trilogy forms what Burroughs referred to as a "mythology for the space age." Such plot as there is for the trilogy revolves around the Nova Mob, superhuman and extraterrestrial forces from outer space who have controlled mankind for three thousand years, taking on the form of a parasitic virus. They control the world by making humans addicted to sex, power, and drugs. Throughout the trio of books, the Mob is fought by the Nova Police, and once again Agent Lee is in attendance on the side of good, trying to "wise up the marks," as Burroughs puts it in street parlance, or expose the Mob's operations and intentions to mankind. The series of novels ends, however, with the battle between the two forces at a stalemate. In all of these early books Burroughs consistently portrays addiction as a metaphor for the human condition, and the act of writing as a subversive, anti-control tactic. For Skerl, this trilogy, "taken as one work, is an achievement equal to Naked Lunch both in its innovation and its power." Yet Skerl also noted that Burroughs's extensive use of the cut-up technique "makes the trilogy inaccessible to many readers."

An End to Exile

Burroughs lived in Paris from 1959 to 1964 while writing his trilogy, then moved back to the United States. After the obscenity trials of Naked Lunch, he moved to London where he resided until 1974. From 1964 to 1971 Burroughs published no new novel-length work, as he had by now used up the pages of notes and routines accumulated during his days in Tangier. Instead he once again gathered new experiences out of which he could fashion longer fictional works. His next major novel, a science-fiction fantasy, was Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead, about a group of homosexual youths who smoke hashish and travel through both time and space, beyond normal societal controls. Told in eighteen scenes and in a more accessible genre style than his earlier fiction, Wild Boys is still concerned with the traditional Burroughs themes of personal freedom and independence from the shackles of society. Skerl noted that Wild Boys marked a new phase in Burroughs's work with a new mythology and metaphor. For Skerl, if addiction was the metaphor of the author's work up to the late 1960s, thereafter it was sexuality which serves as the "central metaphor." Burroughs began exploring the idea of sex and death as the biological trap in much of his later work.

Exterminator!, published in 1973, continues in this more direct and simple style, but with even briefer scenes, and Port of Saints followed in 1975, which continues to develop similar themes and plots of the previous two novels, but also re-introduces themes and characters from Naked Lunch. Because of such an overlap and inter-connectedness between his fictional works, some critics have observed that all of Burroughs's work forms one giant novel. Amid this life lived on an artistic plane, personal tragedy continued to haunt Burroughs. His son, Bill, had become, like his father, a writer; also like his father he abused drugs and alcohol. For Bill such abuse turned into alcoholism that damaged his liver. Despite a transplant, Bill Burroughs died in 1981.

By this time Burroughs had settled in Lawrence, Kansas, and was well on his way to becoming a cultural shibboleth. He made appearances on Saturday
Night Live and started giving public readings of his work throughout the country, becoming the inspiration for a new generation of rebels and societal misfits. He also continued to publish new novels. His 1981 Cities of the Red Night features the private detective Clem Snide, who is trying to solve a case of ritual murder. Other stories and routines also pop up; one plot line is set a thousand years ago in the Gobi Desert, and the main story follows an eighteenth-century gang of homosexual pirates who are trying to set up free-spirited communities for themselves in South America. Burroughs employs genre styles from the detective to science fiction and boys' adventure tales in this novel.

As usual, Burroughs elicited both praise and condemnation for his prose. Newsweek's Peter S. Prescott, for example, complained that "the inspiration behind [Cities of the Red Night] seems retarded: the masturbatory fantasies of a 12-year-old boy," while John Tytell in the American Book Review declared that the same work "is a powerful book and a hauntingly macabre entertainment." Burroughs joined the ranks of established and venerated American writers when he was invited to become a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983. He accepted, and when asked to send material that could be included in an exhibit of the work of new members, Burroughs asked if they would be interested in one of the pieces of art he had begun to create by hanging bags or cans of paint on a plywood panel and using it for target practice with a shotgun. The Academy politely but firmly declined the offer.

In 1984 Burroughs published a novel set in the 1890s, The Place of Dead Roads, and populated it with another gang of homosexual youths who wage war against the straight society. Called the "first gay western" by David Donnell in the Toronto Globe & Mail, the novel was panned by Anatole Broyard in the New York Times: "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." In 1986 the novel Queer was published. Though Burroughs actually wrote the book as his second novel, he did not publish it for over three decades, supposedly because its homosexual content was too strong for most publishers. Passaro found that Queer "is the book that now seems to define [Burroughs] most." In it, according to Passaro, Burroughs first developed his "true comic-psychotic voice and his time-and character-shredding narrative style." Two further novels followed in the 1980s, The Western Lands and Interzone, edited by Burroughs's long-time friend, secretary, and promoter, James Grauerholz.

If you enjoy the works of William S. Burroughs

If you enjoy the works of William S. Burroughs, you may also want to check out the following books:

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, 1954.

J. G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, 1970.

Francesca Lia Block, The Hanged Man, 1994.

Burroughs's reputation continued to grow among a new generation of readers, partly spurred by his appearances in movies such as Drugstore Cowboy,My Own Private Idaho, and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. His influence on music, especially rock and roll, could be seen by groups that took their names (Steely Dan, Soft Machine) from titles of or characters in Burroughs's novels. Even the phrase "heavy metal" that describes a type of rock music comes from Naked Lunch. As Lewis MacAdams noted in Rolling Stone, "[Burroughs] collaborated with U2, Kurt Cobain and Tom Waits. Burroughs came to embody a Luciferian spirit to generations of musicians, from Lou Reed to David Bowie to Patti Smith to Trent Reznor." More than simply an influence on music, though, Burroughs also collaborated on the critically acclaimed musical theater piece The Black Rider, with music by Tom Waits.

Burroughs published mostly nonfiction toward the end of his life. His collected correspondence, The Letters of William S. Burroughs: 1945-1959, appeared in 1994, and his dream diary, My Education: A Book of Dreams, came out in the following year. At the time of his death in 1997, Burroughs was keeping a journal, which was published posthumously as Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs. His passing brought a reassessment of his life and his works. "The importance of Burroughs's writing is undeniable," wrote Lewis in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Robert Cohen of the New York Times Book Review called Burroughs "arguably the most influential American prose writer of the last forty years." Yet, as Gessert asserted, "Burroughs is not for everyone. He wrote neither for those interested only in the mundane details of protected lives, nor for those who believe that some things should never be said." As Gessert further noted, Burroughs himself may be forgotten, but not the effects of his work: "He has already left such an indelible mark on culture that his anarchic spirit will enliven the arts whether or not his works are read. . . . He believed
. . . that history can be changed by art."

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Bockris, Victor, With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker, St. Martin's Griffin (New York, NY), 1996.

Burroughs, William S., Jr. and David Ohle, Cursed from Birth: The Short, Unhappy Life of William S. Burroughs, Jr., Grove (New York, NY), 2003.

Caveney, Graham, Gentleman Junkie: The Life andLegacy of William S. Burroughs, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1998.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 1, 1973; Volume 2, 1974, Volume 5, 1976, Volume 15, 1980, Volume 22, 1982, Volume 42, 1987, Volume 75, 1993.

Contemporary Musicians, Volume 26, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Cook, Bruce, The Beat Generation, Scribner (New York, NY), 1971.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 2: American Novelists since World War II, 1978; Volume 8: Twentieth Century American Science Fiction Writers, 1981; Volume 16: The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America, 1983; Volume 152: American Novelists since World War II, Fourth Series, 1995.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1981, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1982.

Gifford, Barry and Lawrence Lee, Jack's Book: AnOral Biography of Jack Kerouac, St. Martin's (New York, NY), 1978.

Lotringer, Sylvere, Burroughs Live (Double Agent S), Semiotext(e)/MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 2002.

McNally, Dennis, Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, theBeat Generation, and America, Random House (New York, NY), 1979.

Morgan, Ted, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times ofWilliam S.Burroughs, Holt, 1988.

Murphy, Timothy S., Wising up the Marks: The Novels of William S. Burroughs, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1998.

Parkinson, Thomas,Poets, Poems, Movements, UMI Research Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1987.

Skerl, Jennie, William S. Burroughs at the Front, edited by Robin Lydenberg, Southern Illinois University Press (Carbondale, IL), 1991.

Sobieszek, Robert, A., Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA), 1996.

Vernon, John, The Garden and the Map: Schizophrenia in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture, University of Illinois Press (Champaign, IL), 1973.

PERIODICALS

Advocate, June 24, 1997, "10 Most Hated Books," pp. 91-96.

Afterimage, January/February, 2004, Philip Fairbanks, "Gonzo Lives Underground," pp. 14-15.

American Book Review, May-June, 1981, John Tytell, review of Cities of the Red Night; January-February, 2003, Victor Bockris, "Captain Burroughs," pp. 1, 4-5; March-April, 2004, Regina Weinreich, "Good Will Hunting," p. 25.

American Spectator, October, 1993, review of The Letters of William S. Burroughs, pp. 80-82.

Antioch Review, fall, 1995, Blaine Steele, review of My Education, p. 494.

Artforum International, summer, 1995, Patrick McGrath, review of My Education, p. B21.

Booklist, December 1, 1998, Raul Nino, review of Word Virus, p. 646; February 15, 2000, Ray Olson, review of Last Words, p. 1070.

Economist, September 18, 1993, review of The Letters of William S. Burroughs, p. 98.

Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, summer, 2000, Lester Strong, "Intimations of Mortality," pp. 49-50.

Globe & Mail (Toronto, Canada), March 10, 1984, David Donnell, review of The Place of Dead Roads.

Harper's, April, 1998, Vince Passaro, "The Forgotten Killer: The Work of William S. Burroughs, Once Dangerous Is in Danger Itself," pp. 71-75.

Library Journal, November 15, 1994, Edward B. St. John, review of My Education: A Book of Dreams,
p. 86; December 1998, William Gargn, review of Word Virus, p. 104; p. 85; March 15, 2002, William Gargan, review of William S. Burroughs Live, p. 80; April 1, 2003, Michael Rogers, review of Junky,
p. 136.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 18, 1995, Benjamin Weissman, "Dream Control," p. 15.

New Republic, December 27, 1993, Robert Rustein, review of The Black Rider, p. 28.

New Statesman & Society, September 3, 1993, Michael Horovitz, review of The Letters of William S. Burroughs, p. 38; October 27, 1995, Guy Mannes-Abbott, review of My Education, pp. 47-48.

Newsweek, March 9, 1981, Peter S. Prescott, review of Cities of the Red Night.

New York Times, February 15, 1984, Anatole Broyard, review of The Place of Dead Roads. New York Times Book Review, January 15, 1995, Robert Cohen, "Dispatches from the Interzone," pp.
9. 11.

People, December 9, 1985, Campbell Geeslin, review of Queer, p. 24.

Publishers Weekly, May 10, 1993, review of The Letters of William S. Burroughs, p. 60; August 28, 1995, review of Ghost of Chance, p. 105; January 10, 2000, Jeff Zaleski, review of Last Words, p. 54.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, spring, 1994, Alan Ansen, review of The Letters of William S. Burroughs, pp. 272-273; fall, 1994, Steve Dickinson, review of Painting & Guns, p. 236; summer, 1995, Steven Moore, review of My Education, p. 227; spring, 1996, David Seed, review of Ghost of Chance, p. 150; spring, 1997, David Seed, review of My Education, pp. 169-170; fall, 2000, David Seed, review of Last Words, p. 146.

Time, December 6, 1993, Charles Michener, review of The Black Rider, p. 93.

Wilson Quarterly, summer, 1998, "The Last Modernist," p. 136.