William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs (1914–1997) was an American author of avant-garde fiction who, by sheer tenacity, became a major cultural influence, and achieved a strange respectability. It would be hard to find a more unlikely person to become popular in America. He was openly homosexual, spent a lifetime in dissipation, was chronically addicted to hard drugs, and wrote depressing, morbidly obsessed books in a bizarre prose style. Yet, by the 1980’s, he had acquired a reputation as a kind of Mark Twain dressed in black. Much of his writing focused on drugs and the psychology of addiction, subjects he was well qualified to chronicle from personal experience, but which he also used as a metaphor for power, dependence and control on social and metaphysical levels. While Burroughs had little that was positive or pleasant to say about his drug experiences, he was, nevertheless, widely read by users of recreational drugs.
Burroughs was born in St.Louis, in 1914. He grew up in a moderately wealthy household that skirted the edges of Missouri’s high society. He complained that his family and childhood were dull, but his two grandfathers where colourful characters. One was William Burroughs, inventor of the adding machine, and founder of the company that eventually became IBM. The other, James Wideman Lee, was a renowned Methodist preacher of the fire-and-brimstone variety. A maternal uncle, whom Burroughs credited a…