Burroughs practices art as a mode of consciousness--a continual, developing process in which each "work" is a fragment of one "book," that is, all of the artist's creations. Burroughs's success as an innovator gives him a permanent place in literary history as an influential experimentalist, and his attitude of revolt has a constant appeal for youth. These very characteristics, however, limit his readership and reputation.
William Seward Burroughs was born on 5 February 1914, in St. Louis, Missouri, into a prominent family. Burroughs's father, Mortimer P. Burroughs, was the son of the man who invented the adding machine and founded the company that bears his name. Burroughs is his paternal grandfather's namesake. Burroughs's mother, Laura Lee Burroughs, was the daughter of a distinguished minister whose family claimed descent from Robert E. Lee. In the marriage of Burroughs's parents the Northern and Southern strains of the American Protestant tradition and its ruling elite were united. Burroughs's paternal grandfather, originally from Auburn, New York, is an example of Yankee ingenuity and commercial success; and his maternal grandfather, James Wideman Lee, a Methodist Episcopal minister in Atlanta and St. Louis, eloquently preached the Calvinist doctrine that inspired men like William S. Burroughs I. Their grandson inherited both the inventiveness of the one and the verbal skill of the other, and both talents are evident in his work.
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