William Seward Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs (1914), US novelist. After studying at Harvard, Burroughs lived a bohemian life in New York, where he made friends with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and other writers of the Beat Generation. By the mid 1940s he was a heroin ad-dict. In 1951 he killed his wife in a bizarre shooting incident in Mexico. Burroughs’s first novel, Junkie (1953), was followed by such experimental works as The Naked Lunch (1959) and The Soft Machine (1961). His later novels, which continue to explore themes of drug addiction, homosexual fantasy, and political paranoia, include The Place o f Dead Roads (1984) and The Western Lands (1988).
