He is widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular culture and literature. Five books of his interviews and correspondences have also been published. He was initially briefly known by the pen name William Lee. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, made many appearances in films, and created and exhibited thousands of visual artworks, including his celebrated "shotgun art".
Burroughs was 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 , he enlisted in the U. 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. This liaison would become the foundation of the Beat Generation , later a defining influence on the s counterculture.
Burroughs found success with his confessional first novel, Junkie , but is perhaps best known for his third novel, Naked Lunch It became the subject of one of the last major literary censorship cases in the United States after its US publisher, Grove Press , was sued for violating a Massachusetts obscenity statute.
Burroughs is believed to have killed his second wife, Joan Vollmer , in in Mexico City. He initially claimed that he had accidentally shot her while drunkenly attempting a "William Tell" stunt. Much of Burroughs' work is highly experimental and features unreliable narrators , but it is also semi-autobiographical, often drawing from his experiences as a heroin addict. He lived at various times in Mexico City , London , Paris , and the Tangier International Zone in Morocco , and traveled in the Amazon rainforest β and featured these places in many of his novels and stories.
With Brion Gysin , Burroughs popularized the cut-up , an aleatory literary technique , featuring heavily in such works of his as The Nova Trilogy β His writing also engages frequent mystical , occult , or otherwise magical themes, constant preoccupations in both his fiction and real life. In , he was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France.
