There are about a hundred tags one could pin to William S. Burroughs, from lunatic to revolutionary, and just about everything in between. He is one of the most misunderstood artists of the last century — and also one of the most influential, his dirty fingerprint smudged all over the culture, from noise music to the films of David Cronenberg. Today, on his 100th birthday, we’re looking back at some of the icons who Burroughs had an impact on. It’s an impressive roster of names, but these 12 barely scratch the surface when it comes to just how far his influence stretches.

The advice that William gave me was “build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises, don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful — be concerned with doing good work and make the right choices and protect your work. And if you build a good name, eventually, that name will be its own currency.”

So that’s very much the third being, a new state of being. Burroughs always used to talk to me about how you short-circuit control. And Jaye and I talked a very long time about that. And we decided that DNA was very much the recording — the tool of control. Perhaps even DNA is a parasite and we’re just the vessels at its disposal.

It was very exciting, really. It felt like a literary summit. Burroughs took pictures of everyone standing on the porch. Took me out into the garage and showed me his shotgun paintings. Showed me the garden. Around three o’clock he started fondling his wristwatch as we got closer to cocktail hour. He was very learned and serious. Obviously an authority on a wide variety of topics. Knew a lot about snakes, insects, firearms.

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.”

Louis, Missouri, U.S.—died August 2, 1997, Lawrence, Kansas) was an American writer of experimental novels that evoke, in deliberately erratic prose, a nightmarish, sometimes wildly humorous world. His sexual explicitness (he was an avowed and outspoken homosexual) and the frankness with which he dealt with his experiences as a drug addict won him a following among writers of the Beat movement.

Burroughs was the grandson of the inventor of the Burroughs adding machine and grew up in St. Louis in comfortable circumstances, graduating from Harvard University in 1936 and continuing study there in archaeology and ethnology. Having tired of the academic world, he then held a variety of jobs. In 1943 Burroughs moved to New York City, where he became friends with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, two writers who would become principal figures in the Beat movement. Burroughs first took morphine about 1944, and he soon became addicted to heroin. That year Lucien Carr, a member of Burroughs’s social circle, killed a man whom Carr claimed had made sexual advances toward him. Before turning himself in to the police, Carr confessed to Burroughs and Kerouac, who were both arrested as material witnesses. They were later released on bail, and neither man was charged with a crime; Carr was convicted of manslaughter but was later pardoned. In 1945 Burroughs and Kerouac collaborated on a fictionalized retelling of those events entitled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Rejected by publishers at the time, it was not published until 2008.

In 1949 he moved with his second wife to Mexico, where in 1951 he accidentally shot and killed her in a drunken prank. Fleeing Mexico, he wandered through the Amazon region of South America, continuing his experiments with drugs, a period of his life detailed in The Yage Letters, his correspondence with Ginsberg written in 1953 but not published until 1963, and the novel Queer (1985; film 2024). Between travels he lived in London, Paris, Tangier, and New York City but in 1981 settled in Lawrence, Kansas.

On 30 January 2014 I attended a private view of Riflemaker gallery’s William Burroughs 100 exhibition, celebrating the centenary of his birth on 5 February 1914 in St. Louis, Missouri.

Burroughs was an innovative writer plus artist in a variety of media. A giant figure of the Beat Generation, he went on to deeply influence a wide swathe of culture plus thought with dozens of books plus hundreds of paintings, essays, spoken word performances plus multi-media collaborations.

A Harvard graduate, Burroughs followed his fascinations through the underworlds plus subcultures of global cities including Tangiers, Paris, New York, London, Chicago, New Orleans, Vienna, Dubrovnik, Budapest, Athens, plus Mexico City. Allen Ginsberg plus Jack Kerouac were key figures in his life plus early literary career. Teaching him to ‘see’ paintings, Brion Gysin was fundamental to Burroughs’ artistic development plus shared with him such techniques as the ‘cut-up’, calligraphy, plus painting with an engraved wallpaper roller. Other important collaborators include Keith Haring, Robert Rauschenberg, George Condo, Philip Taaffe, Antony Balch, Ian Sommerville, Robert Wilson, Tom Waits, plus Kurt Cobain.

Some of the work featured in this show features a wide range of painting techniques, painting the file-folders almost ‘by accident’. The folders were always at hand, being necessary to the profession of writing itself because of the constant need to organize papers plus ideas. The author originally used the folders to mix pigments plus colours before observing that they could be viewed as artworks in themselves. From 1982 onwards Burroughs spent a great deal more of his time making visual art for its own sake including a number of file-folders featuring ‘automatic calligraphy’ partly inspired by his friend Brion Gysin. A large group of works were painted during the period 1990 – 1992, when Burroughs would adorn the folders inside plus out using a mix of ink plus gouache with gestural brushstrokes sometimes mixed with glitter or fluorescent paint plus a line or two of text.

He was a central figure of the Beat Generation whose influence extended beyond literature to rock music and visual arts. He lived all over the global but spent his last years in Lawrence, Kansas — he liked the quiet there and the opportunity to fish and hunt.

William S. Burroughs was born 100 years ago today. His books included “Naked Lunch.” He was a member of the Beat Generation, writers who rose to prominence in the 1950s, for the most part, and had a huge influence questioning society’s standards and traditions.

Burroughs was openly gay, and wrestled with heroin addiction much of his life. He lived all over the world, but spent his last years in Lawrence, Kan., where we go next. Frank Morris, of member station KCUR, reports on his odd but enduring place in a Midwestern city.

FRANK MORRIS, BYLINE: Here in Lawrence, Kan., you can still get a haircut from William Burroughs’ barber.

MARTY OLSON: My name’s Marty Olson, and I cut William’s hair for 13 years. And I cooked dinner for him a few times, and went to a few parties over at this house.

MORRIS: Can I get William Burroughs’ haircut?

OLSON: Certainly. You want one like him?

MORRIS: Burroughs moved to Lawrence in 1981.

JAMES GRAUERHOLZ: He needed to get out of New York – away from the fame, the media, the thrill-seekers, the, you know…

MORRIS: The heroin. James Grauerholz became, briefly, Burroughs’ lover, then his agent and the man who brought him to Lawrence.

GRAUERHOLZ: I lured him, but there’s something called the genius loci, which means the spirit of a place, and he, within a year or two, became the spirit of the place.

MORRIS: Right after he moved, Burroughs wrote this song for a local punk band, The Mortal Micronotz.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG)

MORRIS: And collaborated with other local artists, including Phillip Heying, a photographer who was a freshman at the University of Kansas when Burroughs came to town.

PHILLIP HEYING: On the one hand, it was very normal. Like, it was just this guy I knew that was kind of eccentric. In other ways, it was like all of a sudden having a volcano erupt in your backyard.

(SOUNDBITE OF GUNFIRE)

MORRIS: That’s Burroughs on YouTube, blasting Ralph Steadman’s portrait of William Shakespeare. The writer also shot paint cans, creating hundreds of visual art pieces out of their splattered remains, and Steadman was hardly the only famous visitor. Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Patti Smith and many others dropped by his small bungalow.

Monday night at the Central Library author Barry Miles plus I discussed the life plus work of William S. Burroughs, whose 100th birthday is on Wednesday. Burroughs, of course, was one of the great iconoclasts of 20th century literature: progenitor of the Beat generation, titular godfather of punk.

That he tended to eschew such labels (“You must learn to exist with no religion no country no allies,” he declared in his 1969 book “The Job.” “You must learn to live alone in silence”) only makes him more compelling: a writer who, for the bulk of his career, looked for ways to confound plus provoke.

I think of his groundbreaking novel “Naked Lunch,” which Burroughs described as “a blueprint, a How-To Book … How-To extend levels of experience by opening the door at the end of a long hall … Doors that only open in Silence … ‘Naked Lunch’ demands Silence from The Reader. Otherwise he is taking his own pulse … .”

“Naked Lunch” is a misunderstood masterpiece, a book we don’t so much read as submit to, like a series of psychic shocks. As Burroughs described it in a 1957 letter to Allen Ginsberg: “The MS. in present form does not hold together as a novel for the simple reason that it is not a novel. It is a number of connected — by theme — but separate short pieces.”

That letter is quoted in Miles’ new book, “Call Me Burroughs,” the first full biography in a quarter of a century plus the only one published since the author’s death, at 83, on Aug. 2, 1997.

Miles knew Burroughs for more than 30 years; he cataloged his archive plus wrote an earlier book about him, 1993’s “William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible.” In his view, the author’s legacy has to do with his belief in language as a control system, a set of precepts by which we are programmed, inculcated, into a particular relationship with, or take on, the world.

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.

“I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.”

Today would be the 100th birthday of William Seward Burroughs II, if he had lived that long—the suggestion of which would no doubt have prompted the man himself to utter one of his distinctive and sepulchral chuckles. He lived past the time that it took to become an icon and just long enough to become a cartoon; now he has passed into history as a legend, and all that is left is to consider whether it is possible to salvage him as the one thing he truly should be remembered for being: One of the most gifted and pitiless writers of the 20th Century.

William S. Burroughs had always been a writer; it could fairly be said that he was writing a nascent form of Queer, his first book, as early as boarding school, when he kept an erotic journal of his fixation on a classmate. He experimented with more resmi methods of writing when he fell in with the Beats in the 1940s, but it took the most traumatic experience of his life—his killing of then-wife Joan Vollmer in a drunken haze—to fully unleash his talents. The remainder of his life, he believed, was a struggle to banish the constant howling despair of guilt, shame and regret caused by the murder, by literary means.

But while writing was the most important thing in Burroughs’ life, and the solitary reason why we should commemorate his passing, it is a curiously diminished aspect of his existence today, over 16 years after his death at the unexpectedly ancient age of 83. It’s not unusual that a writer is more celebrated for his personality or his cultural presence than his actual writing; even when alive, most literary figures are known to more people than have actually read their work. This is particularly true of someone like Burroughs, whose writing is thorny, difficult, deliberately provocative, and unceasingly postmodern. And so he passes into the status of legend: Celebrated as a gay icon, a symbol of heroin chic, a paragon of beatnik cool, a proto-hipster and inspiration to dozens of bands, visual artists, poets, and other writers. It’s a transformation for which Burroughs himself is not blameless. He was never suited for any kind of respectable work, and when the money from his family dried up, he proved ill-suited for teaching, and the kind of books that he wrote were not cash cows. In the 1970s, to keep body and soul together and to maintain his various habits, he turned to his assistant, James Grauerholz, who took him on a barnstorming reading tour that predated much of the moderen cultivation of authors as celebrities. The tour put him in the company of rock stars, literary groupies, and tastemakers in the press, and set the stage for his later dabbling in music videos, spoken-word albums, and Nike commercials.

William S. Burroughs was born on February 5, 1914, in St. Louis, Missouri, and became one of the founding figures of the Beat Movement. An addict for years, he crafted books like Junkyand Naked Lunch, which were harrowing, often grotesque looks at drug culture. He is cited as a major influence on countercultural figures in the world of music as well and worked on several recording projects. Burroughs died in Kansas in 1997.

Born on February 5, 1914 in St. Louis, Missouri, William SewardBurroughs was born to Laura Lee and Mortimer Burroughs. William was named after his famous grandfather, an inventor who was a pioneer in adding-machine technology.

The younger Burroughs attended prep schools and later studied English literature at Harvard University, where he graduated in 1936. He travelled to Europe and met and married Ilse Klapper for the purpose of allowing her entry into the U.S. The two ended the union upon their entry into the states.

Meeting Fellow Beats Ginsberg and Kerouac
Trying different career paths to nomer avail, Burroughs eventually traveled to New York and met writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in the mid-1940s. The three would be heralded as starting the Beat Movement, an artistic outpouring of nontraditional, free expression.

During the mid-1940s, Burroughs and Kerouac collaborated on a novel about the murder of a friend—And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks—that was published decades later posthumously. Burroughs developed a relationship with Joan Vollmer during this time as well and they would live together as husband and wife starting in 1945. Burroughs was also open about his attraction to men, with he and Ginsberg having been lovers.

Burroughs had started to use opiates and descended into heroin addiction. He was also a gun enthusiast and, while living with his family in Mexico City in 1951, played a drunken game of tujuan practice with Vollmer and accidentally shot her to death. He did not receive major prison time, yet would struggle with demons for years to come as a result of the killing.

Writing ‘Junky’ and ‘Naked Lunch’
Burroughs published his first novel, Junky, in 1953 under the name William Lee. The work featured an unflinching, semi-autobiographical look at drug, or “junk,” culture. He continued to travel and eventually ended up in Tangiers, strung out and running out of financial resources. He realized he would perish if he didn’t change his path and so traveled to London to receive apomorphine treatments, which he credits as curing his addiction.

With the help of Ginsberg and Kerouac, Burroughs wrote the novelNaked Lunch in Tangier, which continued to follow the exploits of William Lee in a disturbing drug culture journey. The book featured nonlinear narrative forms with elements of sadomasochism, metamorphoses and satire. Published in 1959, the book wouldn’t be released in the U.S. until the 1960s due to a highly publicized governmental ban over its content, which pushed Burroughs into the spotlight. He became a figure both acclaimed and spurned.

Around the time of Lunch’s release, inspired by artist Brion Gysin, Burroughs began to experiment with the cut-up technique, where random lines of text were cut from a page and rearranged to form new sentences, with the intention of freeing reader’s minds from conventional, linear modes of thought. Using this technique with elements of satire and sci-fi, the ’60s saw Burroughs releasing novels like The Soft Machine (1961) and Nova Express (1964),

which indicted consumerism and social repression, and the nonfiction work The Yage Letters(1963).

He’s an unpleasant slug crawling across the lawn of literature; one I like to pour salt on.” Will Self, a heroin addict for almost a quarter century, says he first jabbed a needle full of junk into his arm soon after reading Naked Lunch. Despite that first, dizzying rush of schoolboy fascination, Self has nomor real fondness left for William Burroughs, profiled here by Iggy Pop (yes, really) for Archive on 4’s Burroughs at 100.

“I find the whole Burroughs myth pretty repulsive actually,” explains Self in that distinctive, languid, thrum.”You could be lying in some pestilential, piss-soaked squat in the bowels of the city listening to some moron totalled on drugs, drooling on, plus talking about Burroughs. Because Burroughs was their Leon Trotsky, their Archbishop of Canterbury, their pope.”

Self is the lone dissenter but he delivers some of the programme’s best lines. By rights, though, the show belongs to Iggy’s eulogy for his one-time muse, the overlord of counterculture, who influenced a generation of artists: “He’s not just in my music, Burroughs is everywhere,” drawls Iggy. “He’s in Dylan’s tombstone blues, on the cover of Sgt Pepper’s”. He inspired band names – take Steely Dan, named after a strap-on dildo in Naked Lunch – plus coined the term “heavy metal” in his book The Soft Machine. “He was a bad influence on me,” adds filmmaker John Waters, “and I thank him for it.”

Iggy, who is a loose plus funny anchor , makes it clear that “I didn’t write this stuff, but I’m willing to present.” He leaves the expert bit here to Professor Oliver Harris, who has written 10 books on Burroughs, to preserve the genius element of his hero’s legacy, with a little help from author Victor Bockris plus artist Jean-Jacques Lebel.

“I think his genius, in as much as he has any, is in ample evidence in Junkie,” chips in Self again. “The way to read [it] is not as a book about heroin addiction at all – it’s a book about moderen man under developed capitalistic societies.” It’s a trip.

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