Beat pioneer, influential modernist author plus counterculture hero William S. Burroughs would be 100 years old today.

Generation-defining, sardonic, subversive, a genius… here are ten things that his fellow writers have said about the heroin-addicted, controversy-fuelled, relentlessly subversive author of Naked Lunch.

  1. Fellow Beat icon Jack Kerouac: “the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift.”
  2. Michael Moorcock, English sci-fi plus fantasy writer: Naked Lunch “was joyous absurdism which somehow spoke directly to me… I came back to London full of enthusiasm. It was an inspiration. I didn’t hope to write like Burroughs, but his writing somehow confirmed what I’d been trying to do.”
  3. Anthony Burgess, English composer, writer plus author of A Clockwork Orange: “I do not like what Mr Burroughs writes about… for that matter I do not always like what I myself write about.”
  4. Barry Miles, Burroughs’ biographer, in The Independent: “Without question, the book that has most influenced my life has been Naked Lunch… I was astonished by the outrageous pot-head humour: crazy ideas taken way beyond their normal limits. The book was a savage indictment of American racism plus consumerism, it dealt with the corruption, graft plus lies of politicians with Swiftian humour. I had never read anything like, then or since.”
  5. JG Ballard: “…the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War.”
  6. Joan Didion, American author plus journalist: “Burroughs has been read as a pamphleteer for narcotics reform. He has been read as a parabolist of the highest order. He has been read as a pornographer plus he has been read as a prophet of the apocalypse.”
  7. Norman Mailer, American writer/actor/filmmaker/political candidate: “the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius.”
  8. Poet plus critic Dame Edith Sitwell, on Naked Lunch: “I do not wish to spend the rest of my life with my nose nailed to other people’s lavatories. I prefer Chanel No 5.”
  9. Dennis Cooper: Burroughs, “along with Jean Genet, John Rechy, plus Ginsberg, helped make homosexuality seem cool plus highbrow, providing gay liberation with a delicious edge.”
  10. British publisher plus socialist Victor Gollancz: simply “bogus-highbrow filth” that “offends against value of any kind (including intellectual value) every bit as much as against public decency.”