William Burroughs was born in St Louis, Missouri, the son of a wealthy businessman. After graduating from Harvard in 1936, Burroughs drifted for a number of years, settling in New York in 1943. There he joined up with the poet Allen Ginsberg and the writer Jack Kerouac, with whom he shared a lifestyle of alcohol, junk food and drug addiction.In New York, Burroughs met and married another drug addict, Joan Vollmer, whom he accidentally shot and killed in 1951. Paradoxically, this gave birth to Burroughs as a writer. "I am forced to the appalling conclusion," he wrote, "that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death. I had no choice but to write my way out". Burroughs' first novel, Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict, was published under a pseudonym in 1953.
In 1954, he moved to Tangier, where he lived in poverty and drug dependency until, almost penniless, he underwent an apomorphine cure in London. Moving to Paris, he began to put together the notes he had made during the 15 years of his addiction. This became Naked Lunch, published in Paris in 1959 by Maurice Girodias of the Olympia Press.
Naked Lunch is regarded as Burroughs' masterpiece, the template for all his work. Written in a stream of consciousness style, it is a nightmare peopled by secret agents, mad doctors, gangsters, zombies, phallic monsters, vampires and extraterrestrials, involved in sadomasochistic orgies, transformations, diabolical plots and interplanetary warfare.
Its nihilistic humour, visionary intensity, strong social satire and brilliant style received critical approval in 1962, when American writer Norman Mailer claimed that Burroughs was "the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius". However, the novel's sexually explicit language and grotesque images resulted in a ban that was not lifted until 1966.
Burroughs' use of the cut-up technique, a collage technique whereby the writer literally cuts up and recombines text, was most widely employed in The Ticket That Exploded (1962). His later novels develop the mythology of the earlier ones, but have a more regular story line. Many critics today regard Burroughs as the most powerful moralist since Jonathan Swift. Others decry him as a sensationalist and pornographer.
