William S. Burroughs

William Seward Burroughs was born in St. Louis in 1914, grandson of the inventor of an adding machine. A Harvard graduate, he lived for a long time on an allowance from his parents. Dependent on morphine and then on heroin, he killed his companion, Joan Vollmer, in Mexico City in 1951, claiming to be aiming at a glass placed on her head, and would say that he would not have become a writer without that death. He lived in Tangier, in Paris and in London, returned to the United States, taught, painted, and died in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1997.

In the catalogue 1

• NovelNaked LunchWilliam S. Burroughs · 1959Literature