(Full name William Seward Burroughs. Also wrote under the pseudonym William Lee) American novelist, short story writer, and essayist.
Along with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs was one of the founding members of the Beat Generation. His most famous work, Naked Lunch (1959), is a nonlinear narrative involving drug addiction, homosexuality, and outrageous social and political satire. The bizarre events of Burroughs’s life and his unconventional writings are often intertwined in both the public imagination and the critical reception of his work.
Burroughs was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to Laura Lee Burroughs, a descendant of Robert E. Lee, and Mortimer P. Burroughs, whose family owned the Burroughs Corporation, manufacturers of adding machines. Ivy Ledbetter Lee was young Burroughs’s uncle and a pioneer in the field of public relations whose clients included John D. Rockefeller and Adolph Hitler. Burroughs’s uncle, and his ability to manipulate language to less-than-honorable ends, had a profound effect on his nephew’s views on the controlling powers of language. Burroughs was educated at New Mexico’s Los Alamos Ranch School and at Harvard University, where he earned a B.A. in English literature in 1936.
