(A meditation on the long and mysterious relationship betw...)
A meditation on the long and mysterious relationship between cats and their human hosts which traces back to the Egyptian cult of the 'animal other' and includes anecdotes about the author's own cats
(Beginning with his very early writing, Word Virus follows...)
Beginning with his very early writing, Word Virus follows the arc of Burroughs's remarkable career, from his darkly hilarious "routines" to the experimental cut-up novels to Cities of the Red Night and The Cat Inside
(Originally written in 1952 but not published till 1985, i...)
Originally written in 1952 but not published till 1985, it is an enigma-both an unflinching autobiographical self-portrait and a coruscatingly political novel
(In The Ticket That Exploded, William S. Burroughs’s grand...)
In The Ticket That Exploded, William S. Burroughs’s grand 'cut-up' trilogy that starts with The Soft Machine and continues through Nova Express reaches its climax
(An opium-infused apocalyptic vision from the legendary au...)
An opium-infused apocalyptic vision from the legendary author of Naked Lunch is the first of the trilogy with The Places of the Dead Roads and his final novel, The Western Plains
(The most ferociously political and prophetic book of Burr...)
The most ferociously political and prophetic book of Burroughs's 'cut-up' trilogy, the book fires the reader into a textual outer space the better to see our burning planet and the operations of the Nova Mob in all their ugliness
William Seward Burroughs was an American writer, novelist, essayist and visual artist. One of the most important writers of the 20th century, he was among the founding members of the Beat Generation of the 1950s, along with writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Herbert Huncke.
Burroughs’s semi-autobiographical experimental fiction which shows mystical, occult and magical world was primarily based on his drug and sexual experiences.
Background
William Seward Burroughs was born on February 5, 1914, in Saint Louis, Missouri, United States to a prosperous and notable family of Mortimer Perry Burroughs, a businessman, and Laura Hammon Lee, claimed to be a descendant of Civil War General Robert E. Lee. Mortimer Perry was passionate about landscape gardening, but in order to support the family, he had to open a gift and art shop titled Cobblestone Gardens. William had an elder brother who worked as an architect.
William Seward Burroughs was named after his famous grandfather, the inventor and the founder of the Burroughs Adding Machine company, William Seward Burroughs I. Among William’s famous relatives was also his maternal uncle, Ivy Lee, who worked as a publicist for the Rockefellers.
William Seward Burroughs II revealed his passion for magic and occult things early at his childhood. As to the writing, his first essays and journals appeared in adolescence.
Education
William Seward Burroughs studied at John Burroughs School in Saint Louis. Then, he pursued his education in New Mexico at the prestigious Los Alamos Ranch School for boys from wealthy families. While there, he had some psychological difficulties. Then, Burroughs moved to the Taylor High School in Clayton, Missouri.
In 1932, he entered Harvard University where he studied English. He obtained his Bachelor of Arts degree four years later.
After the end of the formal education, supported by his family, Burroughs went to Europe. In 1937, he visited Vienna, Austria where he subscribed the postgraduate program on ethnology and archeology at the University of Vienna. From 1949 to 1950, he also studied anthropology at Mexico City College.
At the outbreak of World War II, William Seward Burroughs joined the United States Army and spent there several months before being discharged by the Office of Strategic Services for psychological reasons. After, he collected the variety of jobs, such as an advertising copywriter, exterminator, bartender and private detective. This aimlessness ended in the middle 1940s when he came to New York City.
While in the Big Apple, Burroughs got acquainted with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg who were to fundamentally alter the course of his later life. In 1944 Burroughs also met Herbert Huncke, a drug addict. Burroughs soon became an addict himself and was to remain one despite several attempts to get rid of it, until 1957. Kerouac and Ginsberg's efforts to become writers inspired the older Burroughs to turn to fiction writing.
William Seward Burroughs made an earlier attempt in the 1930s to write detective stories, but that ended in failure and Burroughs had not written anything since. He began to write seriously only in the 1940s. Along with Kerouac, he collaborated on a 1945 novel called ‘And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks’. The story was published only in 2008.
Soon, Burroughs's writing efforts were superseded by his troubles with the law. He had to change one place for another fleeing from the persecution related to his drug and alcohol addiction. He lived in Texas, Louisiana and by the end of the decade finally settled down in Mexico. Burroughs left the location in 1951 after the death of his wife Vollmer of a shooting accident.
For several years after Burroughs traveled, visiting South America, Morocco and New York City. He finished his first novel, 'Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict', in 1951 while living in Morocco. Ginsberg served as his literary agent, placing the manuscript with the New York paperback publisher Ace Books. Burroughs used the pseudonym William Lee, taken from his mother's maiden name, on the book. The complete, unedited manuscript was finally published under his real name and with the original title, ‘Junky’, by Penguin in 1977. Although this first novel was written in a realistic style not found in Burroughs's subsequent books, it introduced many of the concerns later developed in the more experimental works. Because ‘Junky’ was a first novel published by a small paperback publisher, it did not receive much critical attention. The same was with his next story titled ‘Queer’ in which he dealt indirectly with his wife's death. The book would not find a publisher until 1986. Burroughs's writing career seemed at a standstill. In 1953 he moved to Tangier, Morocco, where he lived until 1958, writing in seclusion.
His next novel, ‘Naked Lunch’ was not at first accepted by American or English publishers because of its graphic sex and violence content. The book was first published in Paris in 1959 and had a retitled American edition of 1962, was assembled from the many notes Burroughs wrote while living in Tangier. Several friends, including Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, Sinclair Beiles, and Alan Ansen, helped Burroughs choose the material to use in the book. The novel also met with opposition from many members of the literary community. Despite the negative comments and controversy, ‘Naked Lunch’ has received critical praise from most quarters. It was a national bestseller, made Burroughs's literary reputation, and remains his most widely known book. Along with Ginsberg's 1956 poem ‘Howl’ and Kerouac's 1957 novel ‘On the Road’, ‘Naked Lunch’ formed a group of works promoting the ideas of the Beat movement.
In 1959, William Seward Burroughs came to Paris where he had lived for five years, including the stint at the Beat Hotel. Then, he relocated to London staying there till he came back to the United States. During this period, the writer experimented with cut-ups in fiction, ‘playback’ technique, movie and tape recordings. ‘The Soft Machine’, ‘The Ticket That Exploded’ and ‘Nova Express’ were all written in the cut-up method, utilizing the notes Burroughs had taken in Tangier. The three novels continued the story begun in ‘Naked Lunch’, forming a tetralogy. With ‘The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead’, published in 1971, and his following books, Burroughs abandoned the extensive cut-ups of his tetralogy in favor of a more conventionally organized narrative. The attempt to create the screen adaptation of ‘Naked Lunch’ the following year was failed.
After living abroad for many years, Burroughs returned to the United States in 1973, spending some time in New York City. The next year, with the support of Allen Ginsberg, he had a post of a teacher of creative writing at City College of New York. The writer didn’t like the job at all and soon left the College. However, he soon had to return to the teaching activity at the State University of New York at Buffalo in order to support himself.
The teaching career ended after the meeting with a young bookseller and Beat Generation admirer James Grauerholz. He gave Burroughs an idea to earn living by organizing the reading tours from his work. Since then, Burroughs had given over one hundred and fifty public readings in the United States, Canada, and in several European countries. He also read his work on the ‘Saturday Night Live’ television program. The tours supported the author throughout a couple of next decades. Due to Grauerholz, Burroughs also became a contributor to the famous popular culture magazine Crawdaddy. In 1975, the writer interviewed Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin.
Featuring the pieces of his previous works, William Seward Burroughs continued to create the new ones. In 1981, the writer relocated to Kansas and published ‘Cities of the Red Night’. It was followed by ‘The Place of Dead Road’ three years later.
Burroughs remained active during the last period of his life. Throughout the 1980s, he tried himself as a visual artist and performer. In 1987, he exhibited abstract compositions in the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York City. He appeared in a number of movies, including ‘Drugstore Cowboy’ of 1989 by Gus Van Sant's. His ‘Naked Lunch’ was adopted by director David Cronenberg in 1991. The writer last appeared as a performer in the music video of U2 rock band titled ‘Last Night on Earth’. This time, Burroughs was also actively involved in some audio and musical projects. He collaborated with such musicians as Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Todd Tamanend Clark, Bill Laswell's Material musical group, Ministry and R.E.M. rock bands, The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy and issued his own spoken word album Dead City Radio in 1990.
As to the last written work of William Seward Burroughs, it became the novel ‘Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs’. He completed it a few days before he passed away.
William Seward Burroughs became a member of the Church of Scientology in the 1960s. He soon left it but later praised the positive effect of its techniques and philosophy on his personality. Believing in the further development of the Church, Burroughs denounced its rejection of any critical discussions. The writer’s ideas and his review of Robert Kaufman’s book called ‘Inside Scientology’ led to the confrontation with the Scientology supporters.
Politics
William Seward Burroughs compared liberalism with bureaucratic tyranny. Being a supporter of human freedom to live his life, he considered the legislating activity of government authorities as the structure creating the embarrassments for it. The idea was somehow close to the capitalist business world.
Views
William Seward Burroughs stood against the apomorphine treatment in the middle 1960s. He considered its illegal status as the consequence of the agreement between the Food and Drug Administration, police, and legal authorities. According to the writer, image, sex, power, language, and government are also dangerous addictions. He also was concerned with animal rights, the rain forest, and other environmental issues.
Since early childhood, Burroughs developed an interest to the magic things. He believed that we all live in a ‘magical universe’. The writer spoke openly about his passion and practiced various magic and occult techniques throughout his entire life, including scrying, the measures against spirit possession and curses.
At the end of his life, Burroughs joined the chaos magic movement.
Quotations:
"There are many forms of addiction I think that they all obey basic laws."
"A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on."
"Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing."
"People have nothing to say, but they are afraid of saying nothing, so what they do say comes out flat and vapid and meaningless. The shadow of death is on every face."
"The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible."
"Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape."
"Knowing you might not make it... in that knowledge courage is born."
"Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact."
"Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget."
"You know a real friend? Someone you know will look after your cat after you are gone."
"Like all pure creatures, cats are practical."
"The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself."
"There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve."
"Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is."
"Language is a virus from outer space."
"Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive."
"When you stop growing you start dying."
"Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage."
"There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks."
"The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set-up by the non-dreamers."
"The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time... and you can't see it if you refuse to face the possibility."
Membership
American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters
,
United States
1983
Personality
William Seward Burroughs discovered his homosexuality while studying at school. He hid it from the family till his adulthood.
Physical Characteristics:
One of William Seward Burroughs 's friends, Allen Ginsberg, described him as having "sad, nasty drawl, a voice that goes well with his face, which has the odd quality of being soft and haggard at the same time, a face that can writhe with tics, then gaze with reptilian stillness."
Quotes from others about the person
"His innovative cut-up writing technique, his attacks on the control systems enslaving mankind, and his outspoken homosexuality have made him one of the most controversial and influential writers of the past decades." Bob Halliday, author
"[Burroughs occupies] a strange cultural position as a major figure of contemporary avant-garde fiction and the so-called Godfather of Punk. " Robert E. Burkholder, author
"There can be no doubt that Mr. Burroughs has been one of the principal literary influences on rock music." New York Times writer
"Burroughs is not the sort of writer whose reputation will ever settle into general and genial acceptance. His work will always have its passionate detractors and ferocious admirers." Norman Snider, screenwriter
Interests
guns, cats
Writers
Denton Welch, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Louis- Ferdinand Celine, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Arthur Rimbaud, Saint- John Perse
Connections
William Seward Burroughs was married twice.
In 1937, while in Vienna, Austria, he formed a family with Ilse Herzfeld Klapper. The marriage was concluded with an intention to help the Jewish woman to flee from the country's Nazi government. Ilse and William officially divorced in 1946.
The same year, on January 17, Burroughs married a widow Joan Vollmer Adams. They had a son named after his father. Vollmer died five years later after an accidental gunshot.
As a homosexual, William Seward Burroughs had also male partners.
Watch Burroughs: The Movie | Prime Video
Howard Brookner's 1983 documentary about William S. Burroughs made up of intimate, revelatory footage of the singular author and poet filmed over the course of five years
1983
Commissioner of Sewers
The movie combines interview and archival material, paintings, and clips of William S. Burroughs' film appearances