William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to Laura Hammon Lee and Mortimer Perry Burroughs. His family was very wealthy. Burroughs later attended an elite boarding school, Los Alamos Ranch School, in New Mexico. The experience was unpleasant for Burroughs, and he was eventually expelled. He graduated from Harvard University in 1936 with a degree in English. He continued to pursue studies in archeology and ethnology and briefly attended medical school in Vienna before moving to New York in 1943. There he befriended Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, two of the most prominent voices of the Beat Generation. Burroughs tried morphine for the first time in 1944 and shortly after became addicted to heroin. Burroughs’s battle with drug addiction would become the major theme of his future literary projects. In 1945, Burroughs became involved with Joan Vollmer, with whom he had a son, William S. Burroughs, Jr., in 1947. After a brief stint in New Orleans, the family moved to Mexico in 1949. In Mexico in 1951 Burroughs famously shot and killed Vollmer during a drunken prank. After Vollmer’s death, Burroughs fled Mexico and spent years wandering throughout South America and experimenting with a psychedelic substance called yagé. This experience would form the basis of later publications, The Yagé Letters (published in 1963) and Queer (published in 1985). Burroughs often cited Vollmer’s death as the catalyst for his becoming a writer, though he had begun writing well before that incident. In 1953, he published his first book, Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict under the penname William Lee. After travelling around South America, Burroughs lived for a while in the Tangier International Zone in Morocco, where he wrote most of Naked Lunch. The novel was initially published in 1959 in English by the Parisian publication house Olympia Press before reaching American audiences in 1962. Burroughs later lived in Paris and London, but he eventually returned to the United States. In 1981, he settled in Lawrence, Kansas, where he died from a heart attack in 1997. He published several more experimental novels before his death, including The Nova Trilogy (1961, 1962, 1964), Cities of the Red Night (1981) and Place of Dead Roads (1983).