William Burroughs was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1914. The son of a successful businessman, Burroughs studied English literature at Harvard in the 1930s. A drop-out thereafter, he lived in Mexico, Tangier, and the UK, and for many years was a heroin addict. He began writing in the 1930s but had little success until the early 1950s when he wrote two confessional books, Junky (1953) and Queer (written in the 1950s but published in 1985).
Although largely unpublished for many years, Burroughs was an important figure among the Beat writers of the 1950s, such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. His first notable book, Naked Lunch, was first published by Olympia Press (the original publishers of Henry Miller) in France in 1959. It proved controversial and was not published in the US until 1962.
Burroughs other works include: The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket that Exploded (1962), Nova Express (1964), Cities of the Red Night (1981) and Place of Dead Roads (1984). In 1983 he was elected a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Burroughs’s writings continue to excite and disgust readers in equal measure to this day, but his place in the canon of the twentieth-century literature is established.
by Małgorzata Olsza
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