William S. Burroughs

Revisiting the Life and Fiction of the Beats' Phantom Elder

Aug 4, 2009

Along with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs profoundly influenced his literary peers and helped to pioneer the Beat movement.

Born February 5, 1914, in St. Louis, Missouri, William S. Burroughs, the grandson of the inventor of the adding machine, grew up in a relatively privileged environment. However, he soon rebelled against the norms and traditions of his middle-upper class upbringing and began a lifelong struggle for subversion.

Burroughs and the Beats

The persona and reputation of Burroughs typically precedes him. To many, he represents the shaman of the Beats, the Harvard-educated, necromancer-poet with a hallucinatory vision of the past, present, and future, guided by hieroglyphs and visceral intuition. Famous for his in-depth, drug-addled fiction, brazen and gut-wrenching, Burroughs also receives notoriety for his friendships with other central Beat figures, namely Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.

During 1944, in New York City, the paths of Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac crossed. The three began trying to define an ideology for their progressive generation. The term "Beat" came to embody this ideology. Together through inspiration and collaboration the movement's members propelled an outlaw aesthetic, a ground-shaking endeavor of artistic creativity, unmatched in vitality before or since in literary history.

Beat Fiction

Indeed, much of the movement's momentum resulted from the Beat writing method, what Burroughs scholar, Oliver Harris refers to as "autobiographical fiction," a prose-style in which the author bases the work on his or her individual experiences. This process enabled the expansive myth-making of Beat writers. Soon the authors became living characters, walking, tangible mixtures of legend and reality.

Such was Burroughs fate, due to his loosely autobiographical style and his appearances in other writings. Burroughs appears as Old Bull Lee in Kerouac's On the Road and is described as "endowed with phenomenal fires and mysteries . . . something out of an old evil dream." He also appears in Kerouac's Town and the City and John Clellon Holmes' Go as Will Dennison.

The William Tell Incident

An event occurred on September 6, 1951, in Mexico City that would cause Burroughs' mysterious reputation to mushroom. In a vain attempt at recreating the infamous William Tell act, Burroughs accidentally shot and killed his wife, Joan. After receiving minimal punishment from the Mexican government, and soon out on bail, Burroughs then dedicated his life to writing.

While Burroughs repeatedly referred to the moment as an instance of possession by the "Ugly Spirit," he later would go on to say, speaking generally in an interview found in The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats that, "There is no such thing as an accident. How arbitrary is arbitrary?"

Burroughs' personal lifestyle infused his work and oftentimes overshadows it. His first two books, Junky and Queer blatantly asserted during a time of violent prejudice his own predilection for drugs and same-sex relations, and much of his life was spent moving away from the clutches of law, towards more socially hospitable climates.

Burroughs ultimately produced a substantial amount of jarringly original prose. He also contributed to cinema as a writer and actor from 1963 into the 1990s. Praising the writing of Naked Lunch, Burroughs' experimental "cut-up" novel, which was eventually adapted to film, Norman Mailer once remarked that, "Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius." Burroughs died August 7, 1997.

Books by William S. Burroughs

Sources:

The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats, by Eric Anderson, edited by Holly George-Warren (1997)

The copyright of the article William S. Burroughs in American Fiction is owned by William Padgett. Permission to republish William S. Burroughs in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.