William Seward Burroughs II (February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American writer and visual artist. He is widely seen as a key member of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced both underground and mainstream culture and literature. Much of his work is experimental and includes unreliable narrators. His stories are also semi-autobiographical, meaning they are based on his own life, and often describe his experiences with drug addiction and the places he lived. He worked with Brion Gysin to develop the cut-up technique, a random method of writing. His books often include mystical or magical ideas, which were also important in his real life.
Burroughs was born into a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri. He attended Harvard University, where he studied English and later anthropology. He also went to medical school in Vienna. In 1942, he joined the U.S. Army during World War II. After being rejected by the Office of Strategic Services and the Navy, he began using drugs, starting with morphine and later developing a heroin addiction. In 1943, he met Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in New York City. This friendship helped create the Beat Generation, which later influenced the 1960s counterculture movement.
Burroughs wrote his first book, Junkie (1953), under the name William Lee. He had mostly finished the book before he accidentally killed his second wife, Joan Vollmer, in 1951 in Mexico City. He was found guilty of manslaughter in absentia and received a two-year suspended sentence. His third book, Naked Lunch (1959), caused a major censorship case in the United States after its publisher was sued for breaking a Massachusetts law against obscenity. He also wrote The Nova Trilogy (1961–1964), which used the cut-up technique, and The Red Night Trilogy: Cities of the Red Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1983), and The Western Lands (1987).
In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1984, he was honored with the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the "greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift" because of his "lifelong subversion" of modern American society, shown through darkly humorous writing. J. G. Ballard called Burroughs "the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War," and Norman Mailer said he was "the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius." Burroughs also worked with musicians, appeared in films, and created thousands of visual artworks, including his famous "shotgun art."
Early life and education
Burroughs was born in 1914, the younger of two sons born to Mortimer Perry Burroughs (June 16, 1885 – January 5, 1965) and Laura Hammon Lee (August 5, 1888 – October 20, 1970). His family had important English roots and lived in St. Louis, Missouri. His grandfather, William Seward Burroughs I, started the Burroughs Adding Machine company, which later became the Burroughs Corporation. His mother, Laura Hammond Lee Burroughs, had a brother named Ivy Lee, who was an advertising pioneer and later worked for the Rockefellers. His father ran an antiques and gift shop called Cobblestone Gardens in St. Louis and later in Palm Beach, Florida, after the family moved. Burroughs later wrote that he grew up in a family where showing affection was considered embarrassing.
As a child, Burroughs developed a lifelong interest in magic and the occult, which later appeared often in his writings. He described seeing a green reindeer in the woods, which he believed was a totem animal, and seeing ghostly gray figures playing in his bedroom.
As a boy, Burroughs lived on Pershing Avenue (now Pershing Place) in St. Louis’s Central West End. He attended John Burroughs School in St. Louis, where his first published essay, "Personal Magnetism," about telepathic mind-control, appeared in the John Burroughs Review in 1929. He later attended the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, which was stressful for him. The school was for wealthy students who were meant to become strong, manly individuals. Burroughs kept journals that described his feelings for another boy. He later destroyed these journals because he was ashamed of their content. He hid his sexual orientation from his family until adulthood. Some say he was expelled from Los Alamos after taking chloral hydrate with a classmate in Santa Fe. However, he claimed he left voluntarily: "During the Easter vacation of my second year, I persuaded my family to let me stay in St. Louis."
Burroughs finished high school at Taylor School in Clayton, Missouri, and in 1932 left home to study arts at Harvard University, where he lived in Adams House. During summers, he worked as a young reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, covering police cases. He disliked the work and refused to report on some events, like the death of a drowned child. That summer, he lost his virginity at a brothel in East St. Louis, Illinois, with a prostitute he saw regularly. While at Harvard, Burroughs visited New York City and met members of the gay community, including Richard Stern, a wealthy friend from Kansas City. They traveled recklessly from Boston to New York. Once, Stern frightened Burroughs so badly that he asked to leave the car.
Burroughs graduated from Harvard in 1936. According to Ted Morgan's Literary Outlaw, Burroughs’s parents sold the rights to his grandfather’s invention and did not own any shares in the Burroughs Corporation. Shortly before the 1929 stock market crash, they sold their stock for $200,000 (about $3,800,000 today).
After graduating from Harvard, Burroughs did not attend college again, except for short studies in anthropology at Columbia University and medicine in Vienna, Austria. He traveled to Europe and became involved in the gay culture of Austria and Hungary during the Weimar era. He met young men in steam baths in Vienna and lived among exiles, homosexuals, and runaways. There, he met Ilse Klapper, a German Jewish woman fleeing the Nazi government. Though they were not romantically involved, Burroughs married her in Croatia, against his parents’ wishes, to help her get a visa to the United States. She moved to New York City and later divorced Burroughs, but they remained friends.
After returning to the United States, Burroughs held many uninteresting jobs. In 1939, his mental health worried his parents, especially after he cut off the last joint of his left little finger at the knuckle to impress a man he admired. This event later appeared in his early fiction as the novella The Finger.
Burroughs joined the U.S. Army in 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II. However, when he was classified as a 1-A infantryman, not an officer, he became sad. His mother arranged for him to be discharged from the army due to a disability, claiming he should not have enlisted because of past mental health issues. After being evaluated by a family friend who was a neurologist at a mental health center, Burroughs waited five months in limbo at Jefferson Barracks near St. Louis before being released. During that time, he met a soldier from Chicago also waiting for discharge. After his release
Addiction and Joan Vollmer
In 1945, William S. Burroughs began living with Joan Vollmer Adams in an apartment shared with Jack Kerouac and Edie Parker, Kerouac’s first wife. Vollmer Adams was married to a soldier and had a young daughter named Julie Adams.
Burroughs and Kerouac faced legal trouble for not reporting a murder involving Lucien Carr, who had killed David Kammerer during a confrontation that allegedly involved Kammerer’s unwanted advances. This event inspired Burroughs and Kerouac to write a novel titled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, completed in 1945. The book was not published during their lifetimes but was released in November 2008 by Grove Press and Penguin Books.
During this time, Burroughs began using morphine and became addicted. He later sold heroin in Greenwich Village to support his habit. Vollmer also became an addict, using Benzedrine, an amphetamine sold over the counter at that time. Because of her addiction and social circle, her husband divorced her after returning from the war. With encouragement from Allen Ginsberg and possibly Kerouac, Burroughs became emotionally connected to Vollmer and moved in with her and her daughter by summer 1945. In spring 1946, Burroughs was arrested for forging a narcotics prescription. Vollmer asked her psychiatrist, Lewis Wolberg, to sign a surety bond for Burroughs’s release. As part of his release, Burroughs returned to St. Louis to live with his parents before moving to Mexico to get a divorce from Ilse Klapper. Meanwhile, Vollmer’s addiction led to a temporary mental health crisis, resulting in her hospitalization at Bellevue Hospital, which endangered her child’s custody. Upon learning this, Burroughs returned to New York City to help her, asking her to marry him. Their marriage was never officially recognized, but she lived as his common-law wife. In 2025, it was discovered that Burroughs married a Mexican woman named María Lucrecia Barquera on November 23, 1949, likely for immigration reasons. He kept this secret for the rest of his life.
They returned to St. Louis to visit Burroughs’s parents and then moved to Texas with Vollmer’s daughter. Vollmer soon became pregnant with Burroughs’s child. Their son, William S. Burroughs Jr., was born in 1947. The family briefly moved to New Orleans in 1948.
In New Orleans, police stopped Burroughs’s car one evening and found an unregistered handgun and a letter from Ginsberg that included details about selling marijuana. The police searched Burroughs’s home and discovered drugs and multiple firearms. Burroughs fled to Mexico to avoid possible imprisonment in Louisiana’s Angola State Prison. Vollmer and their children followed him. Burroughs planned to stay in Mexico for at least five years, the length of his legal time limit for the charge. In 1950, he attended classes at Mexico City College, studying Spanish, Mesoamerican manuscripts (codices), and the Mayan language with R. H. Barlow.
Their life in Mexico was unhappy. Without heroin and suffering from Benzedrine abuse, Burroughs began pursuing other men as his sexual desire returned, while Vollmer, feeling abandoned, drank heavily and openly mocked Burroughs.
One night, while drinking with friends at a party above the Bounty Bar in Mexico City, a drunk Burroughs allegedly took his handgun from his bag and told his wife, “It’s time for our William Tell act.” There is no evidence they had performed such an action before. Vollmer, who was also drinking heavily and experiencing amphetamine withdrawal, allegedly agreed by placing a highball glass on her head. Burroughs shot Vollmer in the head, killing her almost immediately.
After the incident, Burroughs claimed the gun had accidentally fired after he dropped it. He spent 13 days in jail before his brother arrived in Mexico City and paid Mexican lawyers and officials to release him on bail while he awaited trial for the killing, which was ruled culpable homicide.
Vollmer’s daughter, Julie Adams, went to live with her grandmother, and William S. Burroughs Jr. moved to St. Louis to live with his grandparents. Burroughs reported to jail in Mexico City every Monday while his Mexican lawyer worked to resolve the case. According to James Grauerholz, two witnesses said the gun fired accidentally while Burroughs was checking if it was loaded, with ballistics experts bribed to support this story. However, the trial was delayed repeatedly, and Burroughs began writing what would become the short novel Queer while waiting for his trial. When his lawyer fled Mexico due to legal issues, Burroughs decided to return to the United States. He was convicted in absentia of homicide and received a two-year suspended sentence.
Although Burroughs had written before killing Joan Vollmer, this event deeply affected him and, as biographers note, his work for the rest of his life. Vollmer’s death also impacted Allen Ginsberg, who wrote about her in Dream Record: June 8, 1955, asking, “Joan, what kind of knowledge have the dead? Can you still love your mortal acquaintances? What do you remember of us?” In Burroughs: The Movie, Ginsberg suggested Vollmer may have been suicidal in the weeks before her death, which could have influenced her willingness to participate in the risky “William Tell” stunt.
After leaving Mexico, Burroughs traveled through South America for several months, searching for a drug called yagé, which was believed
Beginning of literary career
Burroughs described Vollmer's death as an important event in his life. This event influenced his writing, as it introduced him to the risk of being controlled by a harmful force he called "the Ugly Spirit." Burroughs explained that he believed this "possession" was real, not just a metaphor. He compared it to how people in medieval times understood possession, not to modern ideas about psychology. Burroughs believed his writing was a form of "sorcery" to protect himself. He used methods like the cut-up technique to change language and avoid being controlled. Later, Burroughs described the Ugly Spirit as "Monopolistic, acquisitive evil. Ugly evil. The ugly American." He participated in a ceremony to drive it away.
Oliver Harris questioned whether Vollmer's death directly caused Burroughs to write, suggesting instead that Burroughs's difficult relationship with a fictional character named Eugene Allerton, based on his real-life boyfriend, was more important. Regardless, Burroughs had already started writing in 1945. He and Kerouac wrote a mystery novel called And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, loosely inspired by a real-life situation. The book was not published at first. Years later, an excerpt was included in Word Virus, a collection of Burroughs's work published after his death. The full novel was published in 2008.
Before killing Vollmer, Burroughs had mostly finished his first novel, Junkie, which Allen Ginsberg helped publish. It was released in 1953 under the name William Lee. The book was later republished with different titles.
In 1953, Burroughs faced legal issues that limited where he could live. He stayed with his parents in Florida and with Ginsberg in New York. When Ginsberg rejected his romantic advances, Burroughs traveled to Rome with financial help from his parents. He found the experience dull and decided to move to Tangier, Morocco, inspired by Paul Bowles's writing. In Tangier, he wrote a large amount of text he called Interzone.
Burroughs felt Tangier was a place where he could write freely and pursue his interests. He stayed there from 1954 to 1958, working on what would become Naked Lunch. He also tried to write articles about Tangier, but they were not published until 1959 when Interzone, a collection of short stories, was released. Burroughs used drugs like majoun and Eukodol while writing. Ginsberg and Kerouac, who visited Tangier in 1957, helped him type and organize the material into Naked Lunch.
Unlike his earlier works, Naked Lunch used a nonlinear style. After its publication, Burroughs learned about the cut-up technique from Brion Gysin in Paris. He began cutting up words and phrases to create new sentences. Gysin's art inspired Burroughs, and the two became close friends. Their work together combined text, images, and sound.
Excerpts from Naked Lunch were first published in 1958. The book was initially rejected by publishers like City Lights Books and Olympia Press. However, Ginsberg helped get excerpts published in literary journals. A controversy arose when a university editor was fired for publishing a section deemed obscene. Despite this, the book gained attention and was finally published in 1959.
After its release, Naked Lunch became famous and controversial. It was prosecuted as obscene in the United States, but in 1966, a court ruled it was not obscene. This case remains the last obscenity trial for a purely written work in the U.S.
The collection of manuscripts that created Naked Lunch also inspired later books like The Soft Machine and Nova Express. These works used the cut-up technique, which Burroughs defended against critics. The method challenges traditional ideas about the writer's role, similar to how collage works in visual art. In 2014, a new edition of The Nova Trilogy was published with notes and materials to explain Burroughs's creative process.
Return to United States
In 1974, Allen Ginsberg helped William S. Burroughs get a job teaching creative writing at City College of New York to support his friend’s health. Burroughs stopped using heroin and moved to New York. He found an apartment called "The Bunker" on the Lower East Side at 222 Bowery. The building was once a YMCA gym with lockers and shared showers. Rent control laws kept the rent low, about $400 a month, until 1981, when the rules changed and the rent doubled. Burroughs disliked teaching, lasting only one semester as a professor. He found the students uninterested and uncreative. Though he needed money, he refused a $15,000-a-semester job at the University at Buffalo. He said teaching felt like giving energy without receiving anything in return. James Grauerholz, a young bookseller and fan of the Beat Generation, helped Burroughs by suggesting reading tours. Grauerholz had experience managing rock bands and arranged tours that supported Burroughs for two decades. These tours raised his public profile and helped him get new publishing deals. Through Grauerholz, Burroughs became a monthly writer for Crawdaddy, a popular culture magazine, where he interviewed Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page in 1975. In 1976, Burroughs moved back to the U.S. permanently and connected with artists like Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, and Patti Smith, often hosting them at the Bunker. He also attended events like CBGB to watch Patti Smith perform. In early 1977, Burroughs worked with Southern and Dennis Hopper to adapt his book Junky into a film. The New York Times reported Burroughs would appear in the film, but the project failed due to financial issues and disagreements between Hopper and Burroughs.
In 1976, Burroughs appeared in a New York documentary called Underground & Emigrants by Rosa von Praunheim. In 1978, a multimedia event called the Nova Convention, organized by Columbia professor Sylvère Lotringer, John Giorno, and James Grauerholz, celebrated Burroughs’s work. The event took place in New York from November 30 to December 2 and included readings, panel discussions, and concerts. Participants included authors like Allen Ginsberg and Frank Zappa, who replaced Keith Richards due to legal problems. The event also featured musicians such as The B-52’s and Philip Glass.
In 1976, Burroughs was in Boulder, Colorado, with his son, William S. "Billy" Burroughs Jr., and Allen Ginsberg at Ginsberg’s Buddhist poetry school. Billy suddenly began vomiting blood, alarming Burroughs, who had not seen his son in over a year. Billy had published two short novels in the 1970s and was considered a real second-generation Beat writer by critics like Ann Charters. However, his marriage to a teenage waitress ended, and he struggled with alcoholism and long periods of isolation. Billy was diagnosed with severe liver disease, requiring a rare liver transplant. The University of Colorado Medical Center, led by Dr. Thomas Starzl, performed the surgery. Billy survived against the odds, but his recovery was difficult. Burroughs helped Billy with surgeries and complications in 1976 and 1977. His relationship with Billy was described as distant and lacking warmth. Allen Ginsberg supported both Burroughs and his son during Billy’s recovery.
While in London, Burroughs began writing the first novel of a trilogy: Cities of the Red Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1983), and The Western Lands (1987). James Grauerholz helped edit Cities of the Red Night after it was rejected by Burroughs’s editor, Dick Seaver, for being too disjointed. The novel was written as a straight story but later rearranged into a random pattern, requiring readers to piece together the plot. This method differed from Burroughs’s earlier "cut-up" technique, which was accidental. The novel was published without a clear linear form but with fewer breaks. Reviews were mixed. Novelist Anthony Burgess criticized the book for repetitive and disturbing content, while J. G. Ballard praised it as a new kind of storytelling.
In 1981, Billy Burroughs died in Florida. He had cut contact with his father years earlier and claimed in Esquire magazine that Burroughs had poisoned his life and that he was molested by a friend of Burroughs’s in Tangier when he was 14. Billy’s liver transplant did not stop his drinking, and he suffered health problems after stopping his medication. He was found near a Florida highway by a stranger and died shortly after. Burroughs learned of Billy’s death from Allen Ginsberg while in New York.
By 1979, Burroughs was again addicted to heroin. Cheap heroin was easily available on the Lower East Side, and admirers who visited the Bunker sometimes gave him drugs. Though Burroughs had periods without heroin, he remained addicted until his death. James Grauerholz, who managed Burroughs’s reading tours in the 1980s and 1990s, said part of his job was to find drugs for Burroughs in each city.
In 1981, Burroughs moved to Lawrence, Kansas, where he lived at 1927 Learnard Avenue for the rest of his life. He told a Wichita Eagle reporter he liked Kansas because it was safer and cheaper, and he enjoyed outdoor activities like fishing. In 1984, he signed a seven-book deal with Viking Press after working with literary agent Andrew Wylie. The deal included publishing his 1952 novel Queer, which had never been released. With the money, Burroughs bought a small house for $29,000. He was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983 after Allen Ginsberg’s efforts. He attended the ceremony in May 1983. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a poet and friend, remarked on the event.
Death
Burroughs died on August 2, 1997, at the age of 83, in Lawrence, Kansas, due to problems from a heart attack he had the day before. He was buried in the family burial ground in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri, with a stone that has his full name and the inscription "American Writer." His grave is located to the right of the white stone monument of William Seward Burroughs I (1857–1898).
Posthumous works
Since 1997, many books containing the writings of William S. Burroughs have been published after his death. A few months after he passed away, a book called Word Virus was released. This book included writings from all stages of Burroughs’s career. According to the introduction, Burroughs approved the book’s contents before his death. In addition to works that had already been published, Word Virus also included a rare piece of a novel Burroughs co-wrote with Jack Kerouac, titled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. The full version of this novel was published for the first time in November 2008.
In 2000, a book titled Last Words was published. It contained journal entries written by Burroughs during the last months of his life. A memoir by Burroughs, Evil River, was originally planned for release in 2005. Later, it was scheduled for 2007 with an ISBN number (0-670-81351-6). However, the book has not yet been published.
In recent years, new or expanded editions of many of Burroughs’s works have been released. These editions are often called "Restored Text" or "Redux" versions. They include extra material, essays, or content that was removed from earlier editions. The first of these was a 2003 edition of Naked Lunch by Barry Miles and James Grauerholz. Later, Oliver Harris created new versions of three trilogies of Burroughs’s writings. These included Junky: the definitive text of "Junk" (2003), Queer: 25th-Anniversary Edition (2010), and The Yage Letters Redux (2006). After The Yage Letters Redux was published in December 2007, Ohio State University Press released a book titled Everything Lost: The Latin American Journals of William S. Burroughs. This book, edited by Harris, includes transcriptions of journal entries Burroughs wrote while working on Queer and The Yage Letters. It also includes cover art and review details.
In 2014, Penguin released "Restored Text" editions of three of Burroughs’s well-known novels: The Soft Machine, The Ticket that Exploded, and Nova Express. These were officially called "the Cut Up Trilogy" for the first time. In 2020, Moloko Press published "Redux" editions of two of Burroughs’s less-known collaborative poems: 1960 Minutes to Go: Redux and The Exterminator: Redux. These books were originally small pamphlets but were expanded to three times their original size. A new work titled BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS, created by Harris from unpublished drafts and recordings, was added to complete the trilogy.
Views
Burroughs had a long-term interest in magic and the occult, which began in his childhood. He believed throughout his life that we live in a "magical universe." As he explained:
Or, speaking in the 1970s:
His interest was not casual: Burroughs used magic in his daily life, seeking mystical visions through practices like scrying, taking steps to protect himself from possession, and attempting to place curses on those who had offended him. Burroughs openly discussed his magical practices, and his engagement with the occult is supported by interviews and accounts from people who knew him.
Biographer Ted Morgan stated: "As the most important aspect of Graham Greene was his view as a former Catholic, the most important aspect of Burroughs was his belief in the magical universe. The same drive that led him to place curses, he believed, was the source of his writing. To Burroughs, behind everyday reality was the reality of the spirit world, psychic visitations, curses, possession, and phantom beings."
Burroughs claimed his writing had a magical purpose. This was especially true when he used the cut-up technique. Burroughs insisted the technique had a magical function, saying, "the cut ups are not for artistic purposes." He used his cut-ups for "political warfare, scientific research, personal therapy, magical divination, and conjuration" – the idea being that the cut-ups allowed users to "break down the barriers that surround consciousness." As Burroughs stated:
In his final decade, Burroughs became deeply involved in the chaos magic movement. His magical techniques – the cut-up, playback, etc. – were used in chaos magic by practitioners such as Phil Hine, Dave Lee, and Genesis P-Orridge. P-Orridge, in particular, had known and studied under Burroughs and Brion Gysin for over a decade. This connection led Burroughs to contribute material to the book Between Spaces: Selected Rituals & Essays From The Archives Of Templum Nigri Solis. Through this link, Burroughs personally met many leaders of the chaos magic movement, including Hine, Lee, Peter J. Carroll, Ian Read, Ingrid Fischer, and Douglas Grant, head of the North American section of the chaos magic group the Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT). Burroughs's involvement with the movement grew as he contributed artwork and other materials to chaos magic books, addressed an IOT gathering in Austria, and was eventually fully initiated into the Illuminates of Thanateros. As Burroughs's close friend James Grauerholz noted: "William was very serious about his studies in, and initiation into the IOT … Our longtime friend, Douglas Grant, was a prime mover."
The only newspaper columnist Burroughs admired was Westbrook Pegler, a right-wing writer for the William Randolph Hearst newspaper chain. Burroughs believed in frontier individualism, which he described as "our glorious frontier heritage on minding your own business." He associated liberalism with bureaucratic control, seeing government authority as a group of interfering forces limiting personal freedom. According to his biographer Ted Morgan, Burroughs's life philosophy was to follow a laissez-faire path, free from restrictions – a belief shared with the capitalist business world. His dislike of government did not stop him from using its programs for his benefit. In 1949, he enrolled in Mexico City College under the GI Bill, which covered part of his tuition and books and provided him with a seventy-five-dollar-per-month stipend. He said, "I always say, keep your snout in the public trough." When asked about his views on libertarianism in a 1984 interview, Burroughs replied, "That’s sensible enough, of course. The fewer laws, the better."
Burroughs was a gun enthusiast and owned several shotguns, a Colt .45, and a .38 Special. Sonic Youth vocalist Thurston Moore described meeting Burroughs: "he had a number of Guns and Ammo magazines laying about, and he was only very interested in talking about shooting and knifing … I asked him if he had a Beretta and he said: 'Ah, that's a ladies' pocket-purse gun. I like guns that shoot and knives that cut.'" Hunter S. Thompson gave him a one-of-a-kind .454 caliber pistol. Burroughs also strongly supported the Second Amendment, stating: "I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military."
Literary style and periods
Burroughs's major works can be grouped into four different time periods. The dates listed refer to when the works were written, not when they were published, which sometimes happened many years later.
Burroughs also wrote many essays and created a large collection of personal writings, including a book that describes his dreams in detail, titled My Education: A Book of Dreams.
Some literary critics were very critical of Burroughs's work. For example, Anatole Broyard and Philip Toynbee wrote negative reviews of some of his most important books. In a short essay called "A Review of the Reviewers," Burroughs responded to his critics by saying:
— William S. Burroughs, "A Review of the Reviewers"
Here, Burroughs clearly states that he prefers to be judged based on set standards rather than based on a reviewer's personal feelings about a book. Though Burroughs was a complex and sometimes confusing person, he criticized Anatole Broyard for assuming the author's intended message in his works where it was not actually present. This view conflicts with both New Criticism and the older school of thought represented by Matthew Arnold.
Throughout his career, Burroughs used photography extensively. He used it to plan his writing and as an important part of his artistic work. In his art, photographs and other images were included in cut-ups, which are pieces of text and images combined in unique ways. With Ian Sommerville, Burroughs experimented with photography as a way to record and rearrange memories. He took photos of his own pictures and rephotographed them in increasingly complex arrangements that showed how images changed over time.
Legacy
William S. Burroughs is often considered one of the most important writers of the 20th century. Norman Mailer, a well-known writer, once said that Burroughs was "the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius." In addition to his writing, Burroughs is known for his ideas and attitudes. Many respected people have admired his work, including British critic Peter Ackroyd, rock critic Lester Bangs, philosopher Gilles Deleuze, and authors such as Michael Moorcock, J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Jean Genet, William Gibson, Alan Moore, Kathy Acker, and Ken Kesey. German writer Carl Weissner, who translated Burroughs's books into German, often created texts that were similar to Burroughs's style.
Burroughs continues to influence modern writers, especially those in the New Wave and cyberpunk science fiction movements. Writers like William Gibson and John Shirley, who were active in the late 1970s and early 1980s, were inspired by him. A British magazine called Interzone, which began in 1982, was named after Burroughs's work. Many musicians, including Roger Waters, David Bowie, Patti Smith, Genesis P-Orridge, Ian Curtis, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Todd Tamanend Clark, John Zorn, Tom Waits, Gary Numan, and Kurt Cobain, have also cited Burroughs as an influence. Some music groups have names that directly reference his books, such as Soft Machine, The Insect Trust, Steely Dan, Naked Lunch (two bands), Interzone, Thin White Rope, Clem Snide, and Success Will Write Apocalypse Across the Sky.
In a film about Burroughs titled William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, Ira Silverberg discussed how Burroughs explored themes like drugs, homosexuality, and death. These themes also appear in the work of writer Dennis Cooper, whom Burroughs once called "a born writer." Cooper, in turn, wrote that Burroughs, along with other writers, helped make homosexuality seem more accepted and respected. Splatterpunk writer Poppy Z. Brite has also mentioned Burroughs's influence. Burroughs's work is still referenced today. For example, in a 2004 episode of the TV show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, a character named Dr. Benway was included, a name inspired by a character from Burroughs's books. This echoes a scene from the movie Repo Man, which Burroughs saw during his lifetime.
Burroughs also influenced ideas related to the occult and mysticism, particularly through people like Peter Lamborn Wilson and Genesis P-Orridge. Robert Anton Wilson, a writer, said Burroughs was the first person to notice the "23 Enigma," a concept about the number 23.
Some research suggests Burroughs may have helped start the belief in the 2012 phenomenon, a New Age idea that a major change in human consciousness would happen in 2012. Though Burroughs never focused on the year 2012, he influenced people like Terence McKenna and Jose Argüelles, who promoted this idea. Burroughs also wrote about a major change in human consciousness at the end of the Mayan Long Count calendar as early as the 1960s in his book The Exterminator.
Burroughs is pictured on the cover of The Beatles' 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, where he appears in the middle of the second row.