Biography of William Burroughs

Anything goes

February 5, 1914
August 4, 1997
William Seward Burroughs, the "homosexual junkie black sheep from a good family," the investigator than any existing drug on the face of the Earth, the spiritual father of the beat generation, was born on February 5, 1914 in St. Louis, Missouri. Scion of a wealthy family known worldwide for producing calculators, graduated at Harvard, a very singular and "conformist" degree to one of the most transgressive artists of the twentieth century. Literary animal with homosexual urges, a strong attraction towards guns and crime, combined with a natural inclination to break all the rules, Burroughs did not seem quite structured to conform to a society that he considered too "normal". His parents, however, seemed to accept the extravagant lifestyle of the son, and after graduation, continued to support him financially, albeit reluctantly, in the continuous and unceasing experimentation of various hallucinated and lifestyles.
Any literary work of Burroughs relies on its triple experience intoxication, homosexuality and exile.
Sexuality in General is the starting point of his explorations, starting from the theories of sexual liberation of Willelm Reich, an important point which will nourish the literary mythologies. Before becoming a writer, and after losing family support, Burroughs does not miss the classic route from writer cursed: working as a bartender, construction worker, private detective, reporter and publicist in New York (where, among other things, he can also join the underwater world of crime).
In 1943 knows Allen Ginsberg (the famous poet, symbol par excellence of the beat generation), then a student of Columbia College, and his talk so broadly scholar placed it as "intellectual Aristocrat" while Kerouac, the other icon of flower children, understood the genius who lurked in Burroughs. Budding writer became so to Kerouac and Ginsberg elder and wise master, expert of different aspects of life of crime and drugs, as well as great visionary intellectual and social critic.
At some point he married even with Joan Vollmer (despite his homosexual proclivities and the long flirtation with Ginsberg himself), and the two went to New York's most hospitable for life from drug addicts, ending up in Mexico City where he wrote "Junky", his first novel. Unfortunately, that's a tragic period, marked by excesses of all kinds. One episode he does understand very well. Trying to show some friends his skill with a gun, imitates with unfortunate outcomes the firm of William Tell, killing his wife.
Their son goes to live with his parents, while the writer begins to travel the world, wandering from South America up to Tangier. Kerouac and Ginsberg I go to find right in the Moroccan city and find among thousands of papers written, utterly incoherent: gathered together those fragments, takes shape "naked lunch", published in ' 58. In fact, Burroughs did nothing but invent the famous "cut-up", a technique that represents a kind of random Assembly between the texts, whose origin may be the most disparate. The book presents a plot broken up, turned upside down by engraved, asides and flashbacks. In doing so, this way of working was supposed to protect him from clichés, of which the literature of the period sovrabbondava (according to Burroughs), and excessive rationalism.
The same idea, but it worked much less, Burroughs moved into painting: shooting cans of paint against canvases immaculate. "Naked lunch", however, transformed in fact Burroughs in a celebrity, giving life to the worship that is well fed even today all over the world, especially among the culture underground and rock. Moreover, to understand the level of deviance presenting books by Burroughs, suffice it to say that David Cronenberg has taken from naked lunch a controversial film of the same name. This was followed by his main novel processes for obscenity that, fortunately, ended well for the writer. He spent a period living in Paris with writer-poet Brian Gysin; Here Burroughs continued the exploration of the method of composition of the "cut-up". The results are "The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded" and "Nova Express". His most recent book is "My Education: A Book of dreams, published in 1994. William Burroughs, to the detriment of crazy life and troubled that saw him star, made a normal end of the most imaginable. August 4, 1997 died in Memorial Hospital in Lawrence, Kansas, of a heart attack at the age of 83 years.
Article contributed by the team of collaborators.