William Seward Burroughs II (February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American novelist, essayist, social critic, painter and spoken word performer. Much of Burroughs' work is semi-autobiographical, drawn from his experiences as an opiate addict, a condition which marked the last forty years of his life. He is a primary member of the Beat Generation, and is regarded as an avant-garde author who affected popular culture as well as literature. In 1984, he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Harvard University
He finished high school at Taylor School in St. Louis and, in 1932, left home for an arts degree at Harvard University. This period saw Burroughs's introduction to the gay subculture of New York City. He visited lesbian dives, piano bars, and the Harlem and Greenwich Village homosexual underground with a wealthy friend from Kansas City, Richard Stern. Burroughs, who had a lasting fascination with firearms and techniques of self-defense, nearly killed Stern with a mistakenly loaded revolver in an event that would foreshadow things to come.
Burroughs graduated from Harvard University in 1936. According to Ted Morgan's Literary Outlaw, "His parents, upon his graduation, had decided to give him a monthly allowance out of their earnings from Cobblestone Gardens, a tidy sum in those days. It was enough to keep him going, and indeed it guaranteed his survival for the next twenty-five years, arriving with welcome regularity. The allowance was a ticket to freedom; it allowed him to live where he wanted to and to forgo employment." However, Burroughs's parents never had a great fortune; they had sold the rights to his grandfather's invention and had no share in the Burroughs Corporation. Nevertheless, Burroughs lived a privileged life with little direction or need for a career; in fact, he noted in the Prologue to Junkie (novel) that until he became addicted to morphine, he did not worry about supporting himself.
Stories
* Valentine's Day Reading (1965)
* Time (1965)
* APO-33 (1966)
* So Who Owns Death TV? (1967)
* The Dead Star (1969)
* Ali's Smile (1971)
* Mayfair Academy Series More or Less (1973)
* White Subway (1973) - later included in The Burroughs File
* Exterminator! (1973) (ISBN 0-14-005003-5) (a different book than the 1960 volume)
* Snack... (ISBN 0-85652-014-4) (1975)
* Cobble Stone Gardens (1976) - later included in The Burroughs File
* Dr. Benway (1979)
* Die Alten Filme (The Old Movies) (1979) - later included in The Burroughs File
* Streets of Chance (1981)
* Early Routines (1981)
* Sinki's Sauna (1982)
* Ruski (1984)
* The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1984)
* The Cat Inside (1986)
* The Whole Tamale (c.1987-88)
* Interzone (1987) (ISBN 0-14-009451-2)
* Tornado Alley (1989)
* Seven Deadly Sins (1992)
* Paper Cloud; Thick Pages (1992)
Non fiction
* The Yage Letters (1963) (with Allen Ginsberg)
* The Job (1969) (ISBN 0-14-011882-9) (with Daniel Odier)
* Jack Kerouac (1970) (with Claude Pelieu)
* The Electronic Revolution (1971)
* The Retreat Diaries (1976) - later included in The Burroughs File
* Letters to Allen Ginsberg 1953-1957 (1976)
* Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs (2000) (ISBN 0-8021-3778-4)
* Evil River (scheduled for release February 28, 2007) (ISBN 0-670-81351-6)
Collections
* Roosevelt After Inauguration and Other Atrocities (1965)
* Ali's Smile/Naked Scientology (1978)
* Ah Pook is Here, Nova Express, Cities of the Red Night (1981) (ISBN 0-312-27846-2)
* The Burroughs File (1984)
* The Adding Machine: Collected Essays (1985) (ISBN 1-55970-210-9)
* Uncommon Quotes Vol. 1 (1989)
* Selected Letters (1993)
* Burroughs Live : The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960-1997 (2000) (ISBN 1-58435-010-5)
* The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1945-1959
* Word Virus : The William Burroughs Reader (1998) (ISBN 0-00-655214-5)
Collaborations
* And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (1945 - unpublished) (with Jack Kerouac)
* Minutes To Go (1960) (with Sinclair Beilles, Gregory Corso and Brion Gysin)
* The Exterminator (1960) (with Brion Gysin)
* Brion Gysin Let the Mice In (1973) (with Brion Gysin)
* Sidetripping (1975) (with Charles Gatewood)
* Colloque de Tangier (1976) (with Brion Gysin)
* The Third Mind (1977) (with Brion Gysin)
* Colloque de Tangier Vol. 2 (1979) (with Brion Gysin and Gérard-Georges Lemaire)
* Apocalypse (1988) (with Keith Haring)
Many of Burroughs's works were later republished with revisions made by the author, and/or censored material restored. Both Junkie/Junky and Naked Lunch were published in "restored" editions following Burroughs's death. An expanded edition of Yage Letters entitled Yage Letters Redux was published in April 2006.
Burroughs's son, William S. Burroughs Jr., also wrote two novels: Speed and Kentucky Ham. These books are often erroneously credited to his father.
