3. William S. Burroughs
Born in 1914, William S. Burroughs grew up to become one of the primary figures of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author and artist. Overall, he wrote eighteen novels, six short story collections, and four collections of essays. Burroughs was a very well-educated man. In 1932 he studied English at Harvard University; he then studied anthropology as a postgraduate at Columbia, and medicine in Vienna. He, like many of the men famous in this era, engaged in homosexual intercourse and became a part of LGBT culture.
Burroughs’s life was deeply affected by drugs. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1942. The Army classified him as a 1-A Infantry rather than an officer and he became dejected. His mother got Burroughs a civilian disability discharge after acknowledging his depression. Shortly after the Office of Strategic Services and the Navy rejected him, Burroughs picked up a drug addiction. As a heroin addict, he lived throughout London, Paris, Mexico City, and Tangier in Morocco. Much of his work is semi-autobiographical and based on these experiences. He found his first major success with his confessional novel, Junkie (1953) but is best known for his third novel, Naked Lunch (1959).
While living in New Orleans, the police arrested Burroughs for heroin possession. The police then searched the home he shared with his wife and unearthed letters from Allen Ginsberg. In these letters, the men discussed a possible shipment of marijuana. The potential implications of this revelation were grave. It is highly likely he would have to serve time in Louisiana’s infamous Anglo State Prison. Consequently, in 1950 he fled to Mexico City to wait out the length of his charge’s statute of limitations.
In 1951, while living in Mexico City, Burroughs accidentally killed his second wife, Joan Vollmer. Though he later changed his story and claimed the gun accidentally fired when he dropped it, the initial line was that he shot her with a pistol during a drunken round of the “William Tell” game. He attempted to shoot a water tumbler off her head but missed and hit her. After returning to the United States, a Mexican court convicted Burroughs in absentia of manslaughter. He received a two-year suspended sentence.
Despite all this, or maybe in spite of all this, Burroughs is often called one of the most influential and greatest writers of the twentieth century. Burroughs died in 1997 after suffering a heart attack at his home in Lawrence, Kansas. He only had one child, William S. Burroughs Jr., but he sadly died before his father. In fact, in 1981 William Jr. died aged thirty-three as a result of alcoholism and liver failure.