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Written in November of 2000 by Steve Hurvitz, university of colorado student. With editing and fact-checking assist by Will Stotler.
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William S. Burroughs
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William Seward Burroughs II was born on February 5th, 1914, in St. Louis, Missouri, into a family of great prominence. His grandfather, for whom he was named, invented the first commercially successful adding machine and founded the Burroughs company. Although William's father Mortimer sold his share of the company in 1929, sufficient funds were still available to provide Burroughs with adequate educational opportunities, a comfortable home, and in his middle years, a modest allowance to live on. William recognized the safety net the regular arrival of the check provided and observed to biographer Ted Morgan that the value of his father's shares in the 1960s would have been "twenty million reasons not to write." The Burroughs fortune was long gone by the time Burroughs lived in self-imposed exile overseas during the mid 1950s.
Burroughs' mother, Laura Lee Burroughs, was the daughter of a distinguished minister whose family claimed to be descendants of Robert E. Lee. William's maternal granfather, a Methodist Episcopal minister in Atlanta and St. Louis, eloquently preached the gospel of the Calvinist doctrine that inspired men like William S. Burroughs I. It could be said that Burroughs inherited both the ingenuity of his paternal grandfather and the verbal skill of his maternal one. As a moralist, in the traditional sense of the word, Burroughs' work consistently contains strong commentary on society, people, and events.
As a writer, Burroughs carries on the Lee tradition of eloquence, but uses his talent to attack men like James and Ivy Lee and the social order they protected. Indeed, in Burroughs' early major trilogy--The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964)--his major goal is to expose the ways in which the common man is manipulated through words and images; the experimental prose is an attempt to counteract social control through William's own "word-and-image" techniques. Burroughs seems to acknowledge and yet at the same time ironically reject the Lee heritage in his use of the family name as a pseudonym in his novels. His first novel, Junkie, was published under the pen name of William Lee; and in his next four novels the character who is Burroughs' alter ego in the fight against the evil forces of control is called Agent or Inspector Lee. Burroughs is able to express his hatred of his family background and revolt against it through his writing.
During his childhood Burroughs felt estranged from the conventional expectations of his parents' position in St. Louis society. He was irritated by the requirements of mannered behavior and insulted by the attitudes of those individuals who felt that his family was not quite rich enough. He described himself to biographer Ted Morgan as a "chronic malingerer" as a student at the private John Burroughs School. However, he did manage to form a friendship there with a popular young man named Kells Elvins that lasted until Kell's death in 1962. Burroughs claims that he already knew that he was homosexual early in life, insisting that he was born with the predisposition, and while his friendship with Elvins was his "first love," it remained nonsexual, suggesting a desire for the unattainable that recurred with other significant figures in his life.
Burroughs published his first work in 1929 in the "John Burroughs Review." It was an essay written in the investigatory mode of the skeptical examiner who was suspicious of the claims of those purporting to speak for official, acknowledged "wisdom." He continued to build the foundation of a solid, classical education when he completed his last year of high school at an academy in Saint Louis that stressed the works of John Milton and William Shakespeare. Burroughs then entered Harvard University in 1932 where he was under the tutelage of such esteemed professors as the Shakespearean scholar George Lyman Kittredge and the Samuel Taylor Coleridge expert John Livingston Lowes, whose course suggested some intriguing possibilities about the artistic use of mind-altering substances. Meanwhile, Burroughs continued to feel like an outsider, cultivating various eccentric gestures such as keeping a ferret and a .32 caliber revolver in his room to establish an individual identity. He summarized his college experience in the prologue to Junkie, "I hated the University and I hated the town it was in. Everything about the place was dead. The University was a fake English setup taken over by the graduates of fake English public schools. I was lonely. I knew no one, and strangers were regarded with distaste by the closed corporation of the desireables."
Burroughs used his monthly allowance to travel to Europe, where in 1937 he arranged a marriage to IIse Krabbe as a means of assisting her escape from the Nazis. In 1937 he registered for some graduate courses in psychology at Columbia University. Then in 1938 he enrolled in an anthropology program at Harvard, where he joined Elvins in an alternate-paragraph collaboration entitled "Twilight's Last Gleaming," a short satire on the sinking of the Titanic. Through his work with Elvins, Burroughs was able to overcome his self-consciousness about expressing his intimate feelings, and the piece introduced a "Dr. Benway," the prototype of the wildly incompetent Doctor who became the narrative consciousness of much of Burroughs' later writing. When Esquire rejected this piece, Burroughs sank into a deep depression: He didn't write anything for six years.
In 1944 Burroughs inadvertantly turned to morphine as a means of escape from his conventional way of life--it was to be the beginning of his addiction to drugs. He moved to New York with an old friend from Saint Louis and later met Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, who were attending courses at Columbia University. This became the core of a group that provided support and guidance for Burroughs as he began his life as a writer. Historians have identified (somewhat arbitrarily) this core group as the beginnings of the "Beat Generation," although Burroughs claimed he was not a Beat like Kerouac and Ginsberg--both being over 10 years younger than him. Also in 1944, Burroughs began living with Joan Vollmer in an apartment they shared with Kerouac and Edie Parker, Kerouac's first wife. Burroughs divorced his first wife and married Vollmer in 1946. Their son, William S. Burroughs, Jr., was born in 1947 in Texas, where they had moved to get away from the constricting life of the northeast.
For the next fifteen years Burroughs chose drug addiction as a way of life. He voluntarily attempted drug rehab in Lexington, Kentucky in 1948. When this attempt failed he again moved. "I could feel the law closing in," Burroughs said. After being arrested for drunk driving in Texas, he moved to Algiers, Lousiana. He again fled to Mexico City in 1949 before he was brought to trial for his arrest on possession of illegal firearms and narcotics. While in Mexico City, Burroughs studied Aztec and Mayan archaeology at Mexico City University. In 1951, Burroughs accidentally shot and killed his wife--there are various stories surrounding this episode, but no clear version of the event. He was forced to leave Mexico in 1952 as a result of the shooting. He toured South America for several months, briefly visited New York City in the Fall of 1953, then settled in Tangier, Morocco, for several years. With the exception of short visits, Burroughs was in exile from the United States for the next twenty-four years.
In 1956, Burroughs attempted to cure his drug addiction with the help of John Dent, a London physician. After completing treatment, he finished Naked Lunch with the help of Ginsberg and Kerouac--and at the urgings of Kerouac. However, it wasn't published until 1962 and immediately began causing legal difficulties for Burroughs in the United States. The book was prosecuted as obscene by the state of Massachusetts. Other states followed suit and distribution of the book was limited, early copies being printed in Italy and smuggled into the country by sailors. But, by 1965, Naked Lunch had become an important part of the literary landscape, with translations in French, German, Italian, and Japanese. In 1966 the Massachusetts Supreme Court declared the work "not obscene" based on criteria developed, largely, to defend the book. Because Naked Lunch was ruled "not obscene," suddenly works of literature like Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, James Joyce's Ulysses, and D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover, could be published widely in the U.S. The rulings developed at that time of what constitutes "obscentity" are largely in use today.
During this time, Burroughs also wrote a loose trilogy comprised of The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964). By 1964 when the trilogy had been published in its original editions, Burroughs had begun to spend more time in the United States, visiting his son Billy at his parents' home in Palm Beach. He lived primarily in New York and gave several readings in lower Manhattan. It was here that he began work on The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (1970). He was commissioned by "Playboy" to write a recollection of his childhood in Saint Louis; after the essay was rejected he published it in "The Paris Review." In 1967, Burroughs was one of the figures depicted on The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover, and in 1968 he was hired by Esquire to cover the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. In March 1967 Burroughs began work on The Wild Boys (1971).
Burroughs continued to gain a great deal of notice throughout the 70s and 80s, as he had moved back to New York City, into the "Bunker". It was during this time that Burroughs was sought out by a diverse cast of New York culture's players, including Andy Warhol and Mick Jagger. By the late 80s his reputation had grown to the point that he was accepted as a kind of "seer" for a diverse group of scholars, artists, and others. Some of his most noted books of this period were The Job (1970), Port of Saints (1975), Exterminator (1973), Cities of the Red Night (1981), and The Place of Dead Roads (1983).
As a high point of the late 80s, Burroughs was accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters (through no small amount of political work by Ginsberg, who was already a member), the most distinguished honor an American writer can receive.
William S. Burroughs died at his home in Lawrence, Kansas, at 6:50 p.m., August 2, 1997, from the complications of the previous day's heart attack. It is rumored that by his bedside, in his journal, he had just written, "I have found love." He was 83.
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