William S. Burroughs, one of the three seminal writers of the BeatGeneration (the other two being his friendsJack Kerouac andAllen Ginsberg), was born in St. Louis,Missouri, on February 5, 1914, to the son of the founder of theBurroughs Adding Machine Co. He grew up in patrician surroundings andattended private school in Los Alamos, New Mexico, chosen due to theclimate as he suffered from sinus trouble (the school was later used tohouse the Manhattan Project during World War II)). Burroughs took hisundergraduate degree at Harvard College (Class of 1936) but rebelledinwardly against the life that the upper-class Harvard man was supposedto lead during the pre-war period (outwardly he dressed the part of apatrician, with three-piece suit, necktie, black homburg andchesterfield overcoat being his standard wardrobe. His politicaloptions generally were also of his class, i.e., right-wing).

Planning to become a physician, Burroughs moved to Germany to studymedicine. The plight of the Jews under the Nazis was desperate, and in1937 Burroughs agreed to marry Ilse Herzfeld Klapper, a German Jewishwoman, so she could leave Germany and eventually become a U.S. citizen.The two remained friends for many years after they moved back to theU.S., meeting often for lunch when Burroughs eventually settled in NewYork City in the early 1940s. They never lived together, and Burroughsformally divorced her in 1946 so he could marry his second wife, Joan.

Perhaps it was his exposure to National Socialism inAdolf Hitler's Germany that raisedBurroughs' interest in his lifelong fascination: control mechanismsused by the state against its citizens. Burroughs left Germany for theUnited States without completing his studies, bringing along Ilse.

A homosexual in an extremely homophobic age, back in the U.S. hedrifted from job to job while continuing his education as anautodidact. He lived in Chicago, where he was an exterminator, which heclaimed was the best job he ever had. While in Chicago he met the youngLucien Carr (later to be the father of best-selling novelistCaleb Carr, author of "The Alienist") andDavid Kammerer. Kammerer was a homosexual 14 years Carr's senior whohad been his private school tutor and had stalked Carr obsessivelyafterward, following him from city to city. While Carr was disturbed byKammerer's behavior, he was also immature and flattered by theattention, a moth attracted to the flame. When the moth got singed, hewould fly away. Carr dropped out of the University of Chicago to attendColumbia in New York in order to escape Kammerer, and when Kammererinevitably followed, Burroughs tagged along.

Through Carr, Burroughs made the connections that would change hislife: Columbia drop-out Kerouac, then in the Merchant Marine, andColumbia undergrad Ginsberg, then studying pre-law with the idea ofbecoming a labor lawyer. Intrigued by what he heard from Carr andKammerer of Kerouac, he dropped in to see him at the apartment ofKerouac's girlfriendEdie Kerouac Parker, who shared theflat with Burroughs' future wife Joan.

Before the momentous meet-up, Burroughs had begun experimenting withmorphine when he acquired a stash of the drug to sell, and hesubsequently became hooked. Long fascinated by "low lifes" and thevitality they retained while the rest of "normal" Americans seemed wanand dessicated (this was the Great Depression, after all), Burroughsbegan conducting field "research" into New York's demimonde, aided andabetted by Herbert Huncke, a junkie and thief whom Burroughs befriendedand let share his apartment in lower Manhattan. With Huncke playingVirgil to his Dante, Burroughs met the "low-lifes" who would becomepart of his fiction as he journeyed through the rings of hell that wasWorld War II New York. "Sailor", who showed up as a character inHadaka no lunch (1991), was a thief anddrug dealer who once borrowed Burroughs' pistol and went out and shot astorekeeper to death (Sailor later hanged himself in jail after beingarrested for an unrelated crime. He was known as an informer and hadturned in a rival narcotics dealer--he was facing beatings, torture andpossibly murder when he decided to take his own life). Soon Burroughsbegan to deal drugs in earnest in order to keep up with his own habitand fence merchandise himself, becoming part of a den of thieves thatspilled over into Edie and Joan's apartment. The patrician Burroughs,with his high standards, prided himself on giving the best "cut" ofheroin available, with personal home delivery to boot.

Jack Kerouac first urged Burroughs to write. Burroughs spent a lot oftime at the apartment Kerouac shared with Edie and Joan. Heparticularly liked to psychoanalyze Kerouac and Ginsburg, and enjoyedhaving them act out scenarios, little dramas in which they would playroles: Burroughs an old queen/con artist, Ginsburg her pimp, andKerouac as the gullible young American, mouth agape in a foreign land,ripe for the plucking. Their imaginations were quite fertile, and itfed Kerouac and Ginsberg's writing. Burroughs had never really had anyinclination to write until he met Kerouac, but he and Jack collaboratedon a mystery novel they eventually entitled "And the Hippos Were Boiledin Their Tanks," after the last sentence of a BBC-Radio report on afire at the London Zoo. Each wrote alternating chapters, and after thebook was complete, the manuscript was passed around among New Yorkpublishers. There were no takers, and for the time, Burroughs lostinterest in writing.

In 1945 Lucien Carr stabbed David Kammerer to death during a strollalong the bank of the Hudson River below Morningside Heights that was anotorious gay cruising area. After holding the dying man in his arms,Carr weighted down the body of his former tutor with rocks and disposedof it in the Hudson. In bloodied clothes, Carr sought out Burroughs,soliciting advice. Ignoring the elder's wise counsel to get a goodlawyer and turn himself in, Carr then went to see Kerouac, who helpedhim dispose of the murder weapon and Kammerer's glasses. Both Burroughsand Kerouac were arrested (Burroughs as a material witness; Kerouac asan accessory after the fact), but eventually both were released withoutbeing prosecuted. Carr pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sent offto the Elmira Reformatory, where he was incarcerated for two years.

New York City became increasingly untenable as Burroughs became knownto the police, so -- after he and Joan married -- they moved toLouisiana to become farmers. Their crop was marijuana, and eventuallythey moved on to Mexico, where living was cheaper and drugs easier tocome by (and there was less hassle from police). In 1951, at a party inwhich they both were drunk, an exhibitionistic Burroughs shot andkilled Joan in an alleged accident where he reportedly attempted tomimic the "apple on the son's head" scene from "William Tell". As thestory is told, Joan put a glass of liquor on top of her head afterBurroughs beseeched her to perform their William Tell trick for theguests. There had never been a William Tell trick, Burroughs laterruefully admitted, and Joan wound up with a .32 ACP slug in her head.Accounts of the death, which the Mexican police ruled a misadventurecaused by a mistake in judgment, have never been entirely satisfactory.Like Lucien Carr before him, Burroughs may have consciously orsubconsciously rid himself of a lover whom he no longer had any usefor, or was piqued at. Burroughs at the time of the shooting was inlove, involved in a heavy gay affair.

After the death of Joan, Burroughs spent time journeying throughCentral and South America, looking for the drug called "Yage", whichlike peyote was rumored to offer a key to opening the doors ofperception and heightening consciousness. He found it and distributedit among friends. In 1953 Allen Ginsburg managed to get Burroughs intoprint under the pen name "William Lee." His autobiographical novel,"Junkie", was published by Ace Books (the son of the owner, CarlSolomon, was one of Ginsburg's friends) as a 35-cent paperback original(its formal title was "Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed DrugAdict", and it was published as "Two Books in One" back-to-back withanother paperback original in the same volume). Returning to MexicoCity, in the mid-'50s he began writing in earnest while keeping up withhis drug habit, living off the small trust fund he received as a scionof the Burroughs family. It was in Mexico City that he began writingthe sketches that would turn into his major book, "Naked Lunch". In1956 he left Mexico City for Tangiers, Morocco, as the living was evencheaper than it was in Mexico City (as were the drugs). He eventuallyreturned to the US in the 1960s.

"Naked Lunch" has the distinction of being the last major book to beprosecuted for obscenity in the United States. The novel was written inMexico City and Tangiers, crafted from fragments he wrote whileaddicted to heroin. After it was published in Paris by the OlympiaPress in 1959, it quickly became notorious for its graphic descriptionsof sexual encounters, sadism and murder, as well as its no-holds-barreduse of language. Many stalwart defenders of the First Amendment drewthe line at "Naked Lunch", stating that they did not fight the goodfight to getJames Joyce's "Ulysses"and the works ofD.H. Lawrence andHenry Miller before the Americanpublic so that something like "Naked Lunch" could be published. GrovePress acquired the rights to the book, but it was not published until1962, as the publishing house awaited the outcome of other obscenitytrials, including one involving Allen Ginsberg's epic poem "Howl",which featured Burroughs as one of its hipsters searching for "an angryfix". Guided by Justice William J. Brennan, the U.S. Supreme Courtstarting in the late 1950s had relaxed censorship standards to protectliterature that had redeeming social value, no matter that passages inthe works were accused of being obscene. To be banned, a work had to beutterly without redeeming social value. Undaunted, the Comonwealth ofMassachusetts successfully prosecuted the book as obscene.

For the initial trial, Grove Press had gathered together an impressivelist of "experts" such asNorman Mailer todefend the book, but Burroughs' modern classic initially lost, wasdeclared obscene, and was banned in Massachusetts (a banned book wouldbe destroyed, the copies already having been confiscated by thepolice). However, in 1966 the Massachusetts Supreme Court (in Memoirsv. Massachusetts) found that "Naked Lunch" was "not without socialvalue, and therefore, not obscene." With this ruling an era that beganin the 1870s when anti-smut crusader Anthony Comstock led the chargefor stricter enforcement of obscenity laws by the federal and stategovernments came to an end.

By the late 1970s Burroughs had lived long enough to be hailed bycritics and the public as a major American writer. He was embraced bypunk rockers in New York and became an iconic figure by the 1980s. Hedied in 1997 at the age of 83.