william s burroughs biography

William S. Burroughs became one of the founding figures of the Beat Movement. Burroughs' magical techniques – the cut-up, playback, etc. Burroughs had started to use opiates and descended into heroin addiction. The family moved briefly to New Orleans in 1948.[20]. A new biography reveals a William S. Burroughs both ghastlier and more impressive than many previously thought. "[5](p477) His savior was the newly arrived twenty-one-year-old bookseller and Beat Generation devotee James Grauerholz, who worked for Burroughs part-time as a secretary as well as in a bookstore. Grauerholz, James. He sent these writings to Ginsberg, his literary agent for Junkie, but none was published until 1989 when Interzone, a collection of short stories, was published. He bears the name of both his father and his great-grandfather, William Seward Burroughs I, the original inventor of the Burroughs adding machine. Due to legal problems, he was unable to live in the cities toward which he was most inclined. Burroughs was born into a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri. Selected discography. Ted Morgan's biography asserts that their relationship was not spontaneous and lacked real warmth or intimacy. A book composed of letters between Burroughs and Ginsberg, The Yage Letters, was published in 1963 by City Lights Books. Matthew Arnold set up three criteria for criticism: 1. New restored editions of The Nova Trilogy (or Cut-Up Trilogy), edited by Oliver Harris (President of the European Beat Studies Network) and published in 2014, included notes and materials to reveal the care with which Burroughs used his methods and the complex histories of his manuscripts. Loosely biographical, the plot involves a car trip to Mexico City with Vollmer, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Lucien Carr, and includes a scene of Vollmer's shooting. He originally used the folders to mix pigments before observing that they could be viewed as art in themselves. Burroughs Sr. had not seen his son for over a year and was alarmed at his appearance when Billy arrived at Ginsberg's apartment. Mandrake of Oxford. Alt-country band Clem Snide is named for a Burroughs character. Burroughs appears in the first part of The Illuminatus! Born on February 5, 1914, in St. Louis, Missouri, Burroughs was born to Laura Lee and Mortimer Burroughs. Burroughs was named after his famous grandfather, an inventor who was a pioneer in adding-machine technology. The diagnosis was liver cirrhosis so complete that the only treatment was a rarely performed liver transplant operation. [71][94] Burroughs' involvement with the movement further deepened, as he contributed artwork and other material to chaos magic books,[95] addressed an IOT gathering in Austria,[96] and was eventually fully initiated into The Illuminates of Thanateros. His father spent time in 1976 and 1977 in Colorado, helping Billy through additional surgeries and complications. [87], In the final decade of his life, Burroughs became heavily involved in the chaos magic movement. I believe that if you run into somebody in the street it's for a reason. Wilson would recount in his Cosmic Trigger II: Down to Earth having interviewed both Burroughs and Ginsberg for Playboy the day the riots began, as well as his experiences with Shea during the riots, providing details on the creation of the fictional sequence. Burroughs created and exhibited thousands of paintings and other visual artworks, including his celebrated 'Gunshot Paintings'. Introduction p. xviii, in William Burroughs. He spent time with his parents in Palm Beach, Florida, and New York City with Allen Ginsberg. Van Sant's short film "Thanksgiving Prayer" features Burroughs reading the poem "Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986", from Tornado Alley, intercut with a collage of black and white images. In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In any case, he had begun to write in 1945. The film features interviews with many of Burroughs' friends and collaborators including Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, Francis Bacon, Herbert Huncke, Patti Smith and Terry Southern. Burroughs and Kerouac got into trouble with the law for failing to report a murder involving Lucien Carr, who had killed David Kammerer in a confrontation over Kammerer's incessant and unwanted advances. He also makes an appearance in J. G. Ballard's semi-autobiographical 1991 novel The Kindness of Women. [124], Burroughs was played by Viggo Mortensen as the character 'Old Bill Lee' from Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road in the 2012 movie adaptation of the novel, On the Road (2012 film). Although Burroughs would have episodes of being free from heroin, from this point until his death he was regularly addicted to the drug. It has been 50 years since Norman Mailer asserted, 'I think that William Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.' Stevens, Matthew Levi (2014). Burroughs was in New York when he heard from Allen Ginsberg of Billy's death. [5](papers, p.62) While at Harvard, Burroughs made trips to New York City and was introduced to the gay subculture there. His was a prominent family of English ancestry in St. Louis, Missouri. He was fired from the network in 2017 after reports surfaced of his settlements for sexual harassment allegations. His third novel, Prakriti Junction, begun in 1977, was never completed, although extracts from it were included in his third and final published work Cursed Fro [5](pp316–326) Naked Lunch was featured in a 1959 Life magazine cover story, partly as an article that highlighted the growing Beat literary movement. He eventually found an apartment, affectionately dubbed "The Bunker", on the Lower East Side of Manhattan at 222 Bowery. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The documentary is based on never-before-seen footage from his visit to Denmark in October 1983, and from his later years in Lawrence, Kansas. Burroughs, 2003. For example, Anatole Broyard and Philip Toynbee wrote devastating reviews of some of his most important books. [54] His subsequent critical writings about the church and his review of Inside Scientology by Robert Kaufman led to a battle of letters between Burroughs and Scientology supporters in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine. Vollmer asked her psychiatrist, a Dr. Wollberg, to sign a surety bond for Burroughs' release. Since 1997, several posthumous collections of Burroughs' work have been published. Record. When the Moroccan authorities forwarded their investigation to French officials, Burroughs faced criminal charges in Paris for conspiracy to import opiates. This shabby, inexpensive hotel was populated by Gregory Corso, Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky for several months after Naked Lunch first appeared. With this money he purchased a small bungalow for $29,000. — Terry Wilson, "The word of course is one of the most powerful instruments of control ... Now if you start cutting these up and rearranging them you are breaking down the control system." [5](pp238–242), Whereas Junkie and Queer were conventional in style, Naked Lunch was his first venture into a nonlinear style. I mean a definite possessing entity. — M.L. The school was a boarding school for the wealthy, "where the spindly sons of the rich could be transformed into manly specimens". The film tells the story of Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan) and David Kammerer (Michael C. Hall), with appearances by actors playing Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe) and Kerouac (Jack Huston). [2] He later told investigators that he had been showing his pistol to friends when it fell and hit the table, firing the bullet that killed Vollmer. How well does he succeed in doing it? This assessment holds true today. "[38] The two would cultivate a long-term friendship that revolved around a mutual interest in artworks and cut-up techniques. In 1991, with Burroughs' approval, director David Cronenberg adapted Naked Lunch into a feature film, which opened to critical acclaim. His grandfather, William Seward Burroughs I, founded the Burroughs Adding Machine company, which evolved into the Burroughs Corporation. In 1968, an abbreviated – 77 minutes as opposed to the original's 104 minute – version of Benjamin Christensen's 1922 film Häxan was released, subtitled Witchcraft Through The Ages. 2. I've made many cut-ups and then later recognized that the cut-up referred to something that I read later in a newspaper or a book, or something that happened ... Perhaps events are pre-written and pre-recorded and when you cut word lines the future leaks out. William S. Burroughs. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! So he says 'What? [23], Soon after the incident, Burroughs changed his account, claiming that he had dropped his gun and it had accidentally fired. Southern and Burroughs, who had first become acquainted in London, would remain lifelong friends and collaborators. Burroughs shot Vollmer in the head, killing her almost immediately. Transcript published in. He collaborated with Tom Waits and director Robert Wilson on The Black Rider, a play which opened at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg in 1990 to critical acclaim, and that was later performed all over Europe and the U.S. It was during his childhood that Burroughs' developed a lifelong interest in magic and the occult – topics which would find their way into his work repeatedly across the years. Girodias had given Burroughs only ten days to prepare the manuscript for print galleys, and Burroughs sent over the manuscript in pieces, preparing the parts in no particular order. Several literary critics treated Burroughs' work harshly. Joyner Lib., Greenville, North Carolina. Burroughs narrated part of the 1980 documentary Shamans of the Blind Country by anthropologist and filmmaker Michael Oppitz. The actual process by which Naked Lunch was published was partly a function of its "cut-up" presentation to the printer. [5](p355), Excerpts from Naked Lunch were first published in the United States in 1958. [ 1 ] Índice He became a figure both acclaimed and spurned. Once I woke up in the early morning light and saw little men playing in a block house I had made. He released his first album in 1965, Call Me Burroughs, which featured his readings of text from Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine. A key figure of the Beat Generation, William S. Burroughs was an American postmodernist novelist, essayist, poet and spoken word performer. (1973) and penning a screenplay, The Last Words of Dutch Schulz. During this time Burroughs found an outlet for material otherwise rendered unpublishable in Jeff Nuttall's My Own Mag. Burroughs was portrayed by Kiefer Sutherland in the 2000 film Beat, written and directed by Gary Walkow. "use strict";(function(){var insertion=document.getElementById("citation-access-date");var date=new Date().toLocaleDateString(undefined,{month:"long",day:"numeric",year:"numeric"});insertion.parentElement.replaceChild(document.createTextNode(date),insertion)})(); Subscribe to the Biography newsletter to receive stories about the people who shaped our world and the stories that shaped their lives. [86] Burroughs used his cut-ups for "political warfare, scientific research, personal therapy, magical divination, and conjuration"[86] – the essential idea being that the cut-ups allowed the user to "break down the barriers that surround consciousness". [16] He was interred in the family plot in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri,[99] with a marker bearing his full name and the epitaph "American Writer". "[65], In 1990, Burroughs was honored with a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame. The remastered edition of Sonic Youth's album Goo includes a longer version of "Dr. Benway's House", which had appeared, in shorter form, on Dead City Radio. William S. Burroughs was born on February 5, 1914 to Mortimer Perry Burroughs and Laura Hammon Lee in St Louis, Missouri, United States. [66], In June 1991, Burroughs underwent triple bypass surgery. Oliver Harris has questioned Burroughs' claim that Vollmer's death catalysed his writing, highlighting the importance for Queer of Burroughs' traumatic relationship with the boyfriend fictionalized in the story as Eugene Allerton, rather than the shooting of Vollmer. The film is perhaps the definitive account of Burroughs' life, and Brookner and Burroughs maintained a very close collaboration during the shooting process. Does the work exhibit "high seriousness"? Burroughs räknas som en av skaparna av den så kallade beatnik-litteraturen. ... 3. Their mutual influence became the foundation of the Beat Generation, which was later a defining influence on the 1960s counterculture. Grauerholz helped edit Cities when it was first rejected by Burroughs' long-time editor Dick Seaver at Holt Rinehart, after it was deemed too disjointed. and he replies 'Nah, it's probably just junk mail.' Burroughs supported himself and his addiction by publishing pieces in small literary presses. He maintained, "I always say, keep your snout in the public trough. Authoritative biography of cult writer William Burroughs (1914-1997). Grauerholz suggested the idea of reading tours. Burroughs is also cited by Robert Anton Wilson as the first person to notice the "23 Enigma": I first heard of the '23 Enigma' from William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, Nova Express, etc. Although he needed income desperately, he turned down a teaching position at the University at Buffalo for $15,000 a semester. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. In talking about the experience, he claimed that the techniques and philosophy of Scientology helped him and that he felt that further study of Scientology would produce great results. William S. Burroughs is one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century. He began slicing up phrases and words to create new sentences. Words of Advice: William S. Burroughs on the Road, is a 2007 documentary about William S. Burroughs directed by Lars Movin and Steen Møller Rasmussen and produced in Denmark. Rosenthal went on to publish more in his newly created literary journal Big Table No. [120] Jack Sargeant's book Naked Lens: Beat Cinema details Burroughs' film work at length, covering his collaborations with Balch and Burroughs' theories of film. Ginsberg, Allen. Ugly evil. Upon hearing this, Burroughs immediately returned to New York City to gain her release, asking her to marry him. Who's president nowadays?' [21] Without heroin and suffering from Benzedrine abuse, Burroughs began to pursue other men as his libido returned, while Vollmer, feeling abandoned, started to drink heavily and mock Burroughs openly. with whom she had a young daughter, Julie Adams. 1914. A few months after his death, a collection of writings spanning his entire career, Word Virus, was published (according to the book's introduction, Burroughs himself approved its contents prior to his death). [5](p611), Burroughs graduated from Harvard in 1936. If you want too know a lot about Burrough's backround, his family tree and some of his private life, this is the book to find that. These novels feature extensive use of the cut-up technique that influenced all of Burroughs' subsequent fiction to a degree. Billy the Kid was a late 19th-century thief and gunfighter. After being evaluated by a family friend, who was also a neurologist at a psychiatric treatment center, Burroughs waited five months in limbo at Jefferson Barracks outside St. Louis before being discharged. Although never directly focusing on the year 2012 himself, Burroughs had an influence on early 2012 proponents such as Terence McKenna and Jose Argüelles, and as well had written about an apocalyptic shift of human consciousness at the end of the Long Count as early as 1960's The Exterminator.[109]. [113], Numerous bands have found their names in Burroughs' work. Financed by a reclusive acquaintance of Burroughs, the project lost traction after financial problems and creative disagreements between Hopper and Burroughs.[58][59]. The acts Soft Machine and Steely Dan took their names from the writer’s work and Burroughs went on to collaborate with artists of the avant-garde like Laurie Anderson, Sonic Youth and Genesis P-Orridge. In his final years, he cultivated an entourage of young friends who replaced his aging contemporaries. I can't imagine William S Burroughs saying anything so anodyne as he extended his bony hand to be shaken. He traveled to Europe and became involved in Austrian and Hungarian Weimar-era LGBT culture; he picked up young men in steam baths in Vienna and moved in a circle of exiles, homosexuals, and runaways. Burroughs used photography extensively throughout his career, both as a recording medium in planning his writings, and as a significant dimension of his own artistic practice, in which photographs and other images feature as significant elements in cut-ups. The building fell within New York City rent controlpolicies that made it … The music was recorded by the surviving Doors members in 2000 specifically for this album. [d][e][f][g] Later in life, Burroughs described the Ugly Spirit as "Monopolistic, acquisitive evil. © 2021 Biography and the Biography logo are registered trademarks of A&E Television Networks, LLC. [34], During 1953, Burroughs was at a loose end. According to Burroughs, he had known a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. Reason for operation was outrageous and unprovoked discourtesy and poisonous cheesecake. William S. Burroughs, one of the three seminal writers of the Beat Generation (the other two being his friends Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg), was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on February 5, 1914, to the son of the founder of the Burroughs Adding Machine Co. We strive for accuracy and fairness. mix". Burroughs played with audio cut-ups as well via tape recordings. He left for Tangier in November 1954 and spent the next four years there working on the fiction that would later become Naked Lunch, as well as attempting to write commercial articles about Tangier. Before killing Vollmer, Burroughs had largely completed his first novel, Junkie, which was written at the urging of Allen Ginsberg, who was instrumental in getting the work published, even as a cheap mass-market paperback. If you are a William Burroughs junkie like I am, this is a great book to check out. [5](p565) Reviews were mixed for Cities. Organized by Columbia professor Sylvère Lotringer, Giorno, and Grauerholz, the Nova Convention was a multimedia retrospective of Burroughs' work held from November 30 to December 2, 1978, at various locations throughout New York. Prominent admirers of Burroughs' work have included British critic and biographer Peter Ackroyd, the rock critic Lester Bangs, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the authors J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Jean Genet, William Gibson, Alan Moore, Kathy Acker and Ken Kesey. Although not considered science fiction, the book does seem to forecast AIDS, liposuction, and the crack pandemic. An addict for years, he crafted books like Junky and Naked Lunch, which were harrowing, often grotesque looks at drug culture. He is best known for such novels as 'The Sound and the Fury' and 'As I Lay Dying.'. When Ginsberg refused his romantic advances,[35] Burroughs went to Rome to meet Alan Ansen on a vacation financed from his parents' continuing support. Grauerholz, James interviewed 25th June 2010 by Steve Foland. [92][49] P-Orridge in particular had known and studied under Burroughs and Brion Gysin for over a decade. My viewpoint is the exact contrary of the scientific viewpoint. The latter part of the sample reappears throughout. [3] After Burroughs returned to the United States, he was convicted of manslaughter in absentia and received a two-year suspended sentence. Perhaps thinking of his crazed physician, Dr. Benway, he described Naked Lunch as a book that could be cut into at any point. "I Tre Merli" features a longer reading taken from The Job. They returned to St. Louis to visit Burroughs' parents and then moved with her daughter to Texas. Burroughs reported every Monday morning to the jail in Mexico City while his prominent Mexican attorney worked to resolve the case. [18] Vollmer Adams was married to a G.I. . A 2010 documentary, William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, was made for Independent Lens on PBS. [5](p55) His abhorrence of the government did not prevent Burroughs from using its programs to his own advantage. [45] Also, poetry by Burroughs' appeared in the avant garde little magazine Nomad at the beginning of the 1960s. [103], Burroughs is often called one of the greatest and most influential writers of the 20th century, most notably by Norman Mailer whose quote on Burroughs, "The only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius", appears on many Burroughs publications. William S. Burroughs, Letter to Allen Ginsberg, 2nd Jan 1959. Admirers from the late 1970s – early 1980s milieu of this subgenre include William Gibson and John Shirley, to name only two. Be a human animal... be a superman! Those who knew him called him other things. In 1966, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court declared the work "not obscene" on the basis of criteria developed largely to defend the book. During 1982, Burroughs developed a painting technique whereby he created abstract compositions by placing spray paint cans in front of blank surfaces, and then shooting at the paint cans with a shotgun. "The teaching gig was a lesson in never again. William S. Burroughs, letter to Brion Gysin, 17th Jan 1959. [61], Burroughs moved to Lawrence, Kansas in 1981, taking up residence at 1927 Learnard Avenue where he would spend the rest of his life. William Seward Burroughs II (5.2. [57] Throughout early 1977, Burroughs collaborated with Southern and Dennis Hopper on a screen adaptation of Junky. The two fledgling authors were unable to get it published, but the manuscript was eventually published in November 2008 by Grove Press and Penguin Books. I said 'Wow, do you have any idea how big this is!?' It's not one of the iconic William S. Burroughs works, but it's the one I've returned to the most often. ", "Heir's pistol kills his wife; he denies playing Wm. William Tecumseh Sherman was a U.S. Civil War Union Army leader known for "Sherman's March," in which he and his troops laid waste to the South. A common story says [14] that he was expelled from Los Alamos after taking chloral hydrate in Santa Fe with a fellow student. The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs. Burroughs appears in a seven-second scene of the Arcadia's music video "Election Day",[110] sitting in the dark near a stairway and throwing a double-numbered crystal on the pavement. Naked Lunch (sometimes The Naked Lunch) is a 1959 novel by American writer William S. Burroughs.The book is structured as a series of loosely connected vignettes.Burroughs stated that the chapters are intended to be read in any order. Louis. Meanwhile, Vollmer's addiction led to a temporary psychosis that resulted in her admission to Bellevue Hospital, which endangered the custody of her child. Their business fell off. [c], As a boy, Burroughs lived on Pershing Avenue (now Pershing Place) in St. Louis' Central West End. Novelist, multimedia artist. [13] He kept his sexual orientation concealed from his family well into adulthood, due to the context in which he grew up and from which he fled – that is, a "family where displays of affection were considered embarrassing". Flavor Flav is an American hip-hop artist known for his work with Public Enemy and for his appearances on multiple reality television series. The video ends with a close up of his eyes. With urging from Allen Ginsberg, and also perhaps Kerouac, Burroughs became intellectually and emotionally linked with Vollmer and by summer 1945, had moved in with Vollmer and her daughter. Now to close in on the Moka Bar. In the midst of this personal turmoil, Burroughs managed to complete two works: a novel written in screenplay format, The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (1969); and the traditional prose-format novel The Wild Boys (1971). [101] Several of Burroughs early novels, including Junky and Naked Lunch, have been republished in posthumous "Restored Text" editions, incorporating material edited out of previous versions. Sargeant, Jack. Because of her addiction and social circle, her husband immediately divorced her after returning from the war. [46] Dent's apomorphine cure was also used to treat alcoholism, although it was held by several people who undertook it to be no more than straightforward aversion therapy. Lund gave up Burroughs, and evidence implicated Burroughs in the importation of narcotics into France. In the 2004 novel Move Under Ground, Burroughs, Kerouac, and Neal Cassady team up to defeat Cthulhu. Burroughs moved into a rundown hotel in the Latin Quarter of Paris in 1959 when Naked Lunch was still looking for a publisher. In 1990, Island Records released Dead City Radio, a collection of readings set to a broad range of musical compositions. Burroughs was born in 1914, the younger of two sons born to Mortimer Perry Burroughs (June 16, 1885 – January 5, 1965) and Laura Hammon Lee (August 5, 1888 – October 20, 1970). 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. He developed a close friendship with Antony Balch and lived with a young hustler named John Brady who continuously brought home young women despite Burroughs' protestations. In 1992 he recorded "Quick Fix" with Ministry, which appeared on their single for "Just One Fix". [49][50][31], Biographer Ted Morgan has argued that: "As the single most important thing about Graham Greene was his viewpoint as a lapsed Catholic, the single most important thing about Burroughs was his belief in the magical universe. Burroughs initially claimed that he shot Vollmer while drunkenly attempting a "William Tell" stunt.

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