SOURCE: "America's Original Hippy Dies at 83," in The Times (online publication), August 4, 1997.

[In the following obituary, Varadajan offers highlights of Burroughs's career.]

The writer William Burroughs, widely acknowledged as the world's first hippy, has died, aged 83.

Burroughs, whose life was a melange of self-abuse and self-satisfaction, founded the "beat" movement with the novelist Jack Kerouac and the poet Allen Ginsberg.

A junkie, homosexual and brilliant writer, Burroughs was also famous for shooting his partner in the head in a drug-addled attempt to recreate the apple episode from William Tell. She balanced a glass on her head at a party in Mexico City, but Burroughs' aim let him down. Her death was to be the most famous case of wife-killing until O. J. Simpson.

Burroughs' most famous work, Naked Lunch, is a roller-coaster ride through the psyche of a drug addict and a deviant world of junkies, perverts and...