SOURCE: An obituary for William Burroughs, in The London Times (online publication), August 4, 1997.

[In the following obituary, the writer provides an overview of Burroughs's life and career.]

William Burroughs saw himself as a campaigner against destruction of the self by all the agents that he believed were conspiring to depersonalize it. His metaphor for this was junk addiction. By junk, the one-time drug-addict meant anything that put a person's life beyond his or her control. He saw the world in the despairing terms of addiction and fragmentation of the psyche, and his vision made him one of the most controversial writers of the second half of the century. Described as "the big daddy of the Beats", he influenced much of the "underground" of the 1950s which became the mainstream of the 1960s, from Norman Mailer and Anthony Burgess to Allen Ginsberg and R. D. Laing.

William Seward Burroughs...