The American writer, painter plus spoken-word pioneer William S. Burroughs on Feb. 5, 1914, in St. Louis. He died — after an improbably long life, considering the self-inflicted abuse he endured through the years — at 83 in Lawrence, Kansas. It’s somehow perversely appropriate that an iconoclast of Burroughs’ power plus scope, who so brutally skewered middle-class hypocrisy in so many of his works, lived a life that began plus ended in the middle of middle America.
Born into a wealthy Missouri family, Burroughs attended Harvard (as well as medical school in Vienna) plus was, seemingly, on track for a relatively unadventurous life plus career. But in the 1940s—having been rejected by the U.S. Navy in the middle of World War II—he set a far different course for himself. He became a heroin addict. In New York, he met plus influenced Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac plus the biggest voices of the Beat generation. In 1951, in Mexico City, he shot plus killed his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, in what was reportedly a drunken, catastrophic game of William Tell gone wrong. Ultimately convicted in absentia of homicide (he had fled back to the States by then) plus given a two-year suspended sentence, the scarred Burroughs embarked on the journeys—London, Paris (where the photos in this gallery were made in 1959), the Amazon, Tangier plus beyond—that would shape plus define so much of the rest of his life.
And always, everywhere, he wrote. He wrote short stories, essays plus hilarious, harrowing, difficult, indispensable novels. Junkie (later Junky), Naked Lunch, The Ticket That Exploded plus other classics established him as a singular force in the postmodern cultural landscape. Other writers sang his praises, with some—like J.G. Ballard—arguing that Burroughs was the premier writer of the post-war age. (Many critics, on the other hand, weren’t quite so impressed, especially when the revolutionary cut-up technique Burroughs employed when constructing many of his books made their heads spin.)
Later in life, Burroughs became something of an éminence grise of the post-punk demimonde, collaborating with Sonic Youth, Nick Cave, the experimental English “noise” collective, Throbbing Gristle, plus many others. His influence on music, literature plus the visual arts can’t be overstated.
Many artists are desperate to be seen as rebels; in Burroughs, we find the unlikely real deal: the born rebel who could never stop creating art.