William S. Burroughs

Also known as William Seward Burroughs II, William Lee, William Burroughs, William Seward Burroughs, Willy Lee

American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer (1914–1997)

AI overview

William S. Burroughs was an American writer and artist (1914–1997) who worked across multiple forms including novels, short stories, essays, painting, and spoken word performance. He is remembered as an influential and controversial figure in 20th-century literature and culture.

AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.

Person · Open Library

Born: 1914
Died: 1997
Works: 341

Top works

Lettres
Le festin nu
Naked Lunch
Narkotyki
The Moroccan; James Brown

via Open Library + Wikidata

Music · MusicBrainz

Type: Person
Country: US
Active from: 1914-02-05
Active to: 1997-08-02

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners: 63,844
Total plays: 630,438

Recent publications · Crossref

5 total works indexed

VMD: Visual molecular dynamics
· 1996 · cited 62,851x
Theory of the firm: Managerial behavior, agency costs and ownership structure
· 1976 · cited 44,787x
Comparison of simple potential functions for simulating liquid water
· 1983 · cited 39,496x
QIIME allows analysis of high-throughput community sequencing data
· 2010 · cited 30,937x
Preparation of Graphitic Oxide
· 1958 · cited 28,675x

via Crossref · CC0

Quotes

“The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.”
“Communication must become total and conscious before we can stop it.”
“1. Never give anything away for nothing. 2. Never give more than you have to (always catch the buyer hungry and always make him wait). 3. Always take back everything if you possibly can.”
“You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary — it's always imaginary — world in which I would like to live.”
“The hallucinogens produce visionary states, sort of, but morphine and its derivatives decrease awareness of inner processes, thoughts and feelings. They are pain killers; pure and simple. They are absolutely contraindicated for creative work, and I include in the lot alcohol, morphine, barbiturates, tranquilizers — the whole spectrum of sedative drugs.”
“A paranoid man is a man who knows a little about what's going on.”

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

~40 min read

Encyclopedic overview

William Seward Burroughs II (/ˈbʌroʊz/; February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American writer and visual artist. He is widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced both underground and popular culture and literature. Much of Burroughs's work is highly experimental and features unreliable narrators. Also noted as semi-autobiographical, his work often drew from his experiences with drug addiction, and featured his various places of residence as settings in much of his work. With Brion Gysin, Burroughs popularized the cut-up, an aleatory literary technique. His writing also engaged frequent mystical, occult, or otherwise magical themes, constant preoccupations in both his fiction and real life.

Born into a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, Burroughs attended Harvard University, where he studied English, then anthropology as a postgraduate, and went on to medical school in Vienna. In 1942, he enlisted in the U.S. Army to serve during World War II. After being turned down by both the Office of Strategic Services and the Navy, he veered into substance abuse, beginning with morphine and developing a heroin addiction that would affect him for the rest of his life. In 1943, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac while living in New York City. This liaison would become the foundation of the Beat Generation, later a defining influence on the 1960s counterculture.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “William S. Burroughs” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.