Highly-accomplished and highly-controversial author of Naked Lunch: Wm S Burroughs

Wm S Burroughs
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William Seward Burroughs II (1914 – 1997) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer.

A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century."[1]

His influence affected a range of popular culture (see the iconic stencil above) as well as literature. Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays, says Wikipedia.

Born to a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, he was grandson of the inventor and founder of the Burroughs Corporation. Burroughs began writing essays and journals in early adolescence. He left home in 1932 to attend Harvard University, studying English, and anthropology as a postgraduate, and later attending medical school in Vienna.

In 1943, while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. They were the foundation of what became the countercultural movement of the Beat Generation.

Finding success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), Burroughs is perhaps best known for his third novel Naked Lunch (1959), a controversy-fraught work that underwent a court case under the U.S. sodomy laws. With Brion Gysin, he also popularized the literary cut-up technique in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961–64).

Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the "greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift,"[3] a reputation he owes to his "lifelong subversion"[1] of the moral, political and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism.

Whereas Junkie and Queer were conventional in style, Naked Lunch was his first venture into a non-linear style. Although not considered science fiction, the book does seem to forecast—with eerie prescience—such later phenomena as AIDS, liposuction, autoerotic fatalities, and the crack pandemic.[27]

The manuscripts that produced Naked Lunch also produced the later works The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1963). These novels feature extensive use of the cut-up technique which influenced all of Burroughs' subsequent fiction to a degree.

The cut-up method, because of its random or mechanical basis for text generation, combined with the possibilities of mixing in text written by other writers, deemphasizes the traditional role of the writer as creator or originator of a string of words, while simultaneously exalting the importance of the writer's sensibility as an editor. In this sense, the cut-up method may be considered as analogous to the collage method in the visual arts.

Burroughs life was bedeviled by a range of un-recommendable drugs, difficult sex and untoward deaths. Yet he lived to age 83 and in his later years appeared in movies and was lionized by establishment and counter-cultural figures.