The legend surrounding Burroughs's life has tended to deflect attention from his actual accomplishments while intertwining the life of the man with his work in ways that require knowledge of both to make either intelligible. His influence on musicians, filmmakers, computer hackers, and others with antiestablishment agendas has frequently overshadowed his importance as a writer. However, his employment of a Joycean stream-of-consciousness narrative; his prefiguring of postmodernism in his fusion of disparate modes; his development of a novel that does not depend on traditional methods of shaping plot, characters, and dialogue; and his creation of a distinctly singular voice that combines several strains of American speech while retaining its own characteristic qualities should ensure his place in twentieth-century literature. His abilities as a writer -- in conjunction with his often-prophetic mapping of the direction of Western society in the last decades of the twentieth century and his scrutinizing examination of the life of an underclass of social outlaws and misfits -- have kept Burroughs relevant while other practitioners of an extremist sensibility, as well as once-celebrated champions of more conventional literary forms, have receded from public consciousness.
William Seward Burroughs II was born in Saint Louis on 5 February 1914.
