Richard Severo (obituary date 3 August 1997)

SOURCE: "William S. Burroughs Dies at 83; Member of the Beat Generation Wrote Naked Lunch," in The New York Times, August 3, 1997, p. B5.

[In the following obituary, Severo reviews Burroughs's life and literary achievements.]

William S. Burroughs, a renegade writer of the Beat Generation who stunned readers and inspired adoring cultists with his 1959 book Naked Lunch, died yesterday afternoon at Lawrence Memorial Hospital in Lawrence, Kan. He was 83.

The cause of his death, at Lawrence Memorial Hospital, was a heart attack that he suffered on Friday, his publicist, Ira Silverberg, said.

Over the years, Mr. Burroughs had lived in such places as New York, London, Paris, Mexico City and Tangier. But since 1981 he maintained a house in Lawrence, where he lived simply with three cats and indulged his interests in painting and photography and in collecting and discharging firearms.

Mr. Burroughs had undergone triple bypass surgery in 1991. He quit smoking after the operation. And though he continued to suffer from a leaky heart valve, from all reports, he regained robust health quickly for a man of his years.

His recovery was all the more noteworthy since he had spent so many of his younger days engulfed in narcotics addiction, an imperative so demanding that in 1954, while living in London, he sold his typewriter to buy heroin, although he kept working in longhand. He spent years experimenting with drugs as well as with sex, which he engaged in with men, women and children.

Naked Lunch, first published in Paris, and later by Grove Press in New York, was hailed as a masterly definition of what was hip, although the critics were not sure how to define the definition. Herbert Gold, writing in The New York Times, said that the book was "less a novel than a series of essays, puns, epigrams—all hovering about the explicit subject matter of making out on drugs while not making out in either work or love." Mr. Gold called the book "booty brought back from a nightmare."

Newsweek said that Naked Lunch possessed a "strange genius" and was a masterpiece "but a totally insane and anarchic one, and it can only be diminished by attempts to give it a social purpose or value whatever."

For his part, Mr. Burroughs said he agreed with the writer Mary McCarthy, who thought that Naked Lunch, and his other books, had a deep moral purpose.

"I do definitely mean what I say to be taken literally, yes, to make people aware of the true criminality of our times, to wise up to the marks," Mr. Burroughs told an interviewer in 1970.

Nobody found it especially easy to impose literality on Mr. Burroughs's sentences, either written or spoken. He described Naked Lunch as "a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork."

His work was not for traditionalists who loved a well-developed narrative. Dame Edith Sitwell was among those who demurred from the critics' praise, denouncing Naked Lunch as psychopathological filth. And even those who admired Mr. Burroughs's iconoclasm and his ruthless honesty had to admit that they could see flaws in the man. He was, in the final analysis, an alien among aliens, the ultimate odd duck.

"Just because he sleeps with boys, takes drugs and smokes dope doesn't mean that he tolerates or supports the majority of junkies, homosexuals or potheads," wrote Barry Miles In his 1993 biography, William Burroughs, which was subtitled El Hombre Invisible and published by Hyperion. "Bill simply doesn't like most people."

William Seward Burroughs was born on Feb. 5, 1914, in St. Louis, the son of Mortimer P. Burroughs, the owner of a plate-glass company, and Laura Lee Burroughs, who came from a prominent Southern family. His grandfather, for whom he was named, invented the perforated, oil-filled cylinder that made the Burroughs adding machine add and invariably get the right answer. The machine became a standard fixture in small and large businesses everywhere.

Mr. Burroughs's parents sold their stock in the Burroughs Company shortly before the stock market crash of 1929, and the $200,000 they received saw them nicely through the Depression. It did not leave the author with much of a legacy; his mother died in 1970, and what was left of her share of the estate was $10,000.

When Mr. Burroughs was a teen-ager, he read You Can't Win, an autobiography of Jack Black, a drifter who took drugs and pilfered his way through a sordid, predatory life. The book made a considerable impression on him and became grist for his own books years later. It was around this time that he, too, started experimenting with drugs.

Mr. Burroughs was educated, not happily, in private schools in St. Louis and in Los Alamos, N.M.

He was sent to Harvard University, which he did not like any better than he had his preparatory schools, although the time spent reading pleased him. His favorite writers gave no hint of what was ultimately to come out of his typewriter. They included Shakespeare, Coleridge and DeQuincy. Other writers he came to admire included James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Jean Genet, Franz Kafka, Graham Greene and Raymond Chandler. He received a baccalaureate degree from Harvard in 1936.

He took a vacation to Europe after graduation and in Dubrovnik met Ilse Klapper, a German Jew who had fled the Nazis. She was stranded, unable to renew her Yugoslav passport and unable to go to the United States. To accommodate her, he married her. They never lived together, and dissolved the marriage almost immediately upon returning to the United States, but they remained friends.

After his return to the United States, he worked at many jobs, including bartender, private detective, factory worker and insect exterminator. Except for exterminating, which he rather enjoyed, these jobs bored him.

He later recalled his experiences in Exterminator! published by Viking in 1973.

In the years before World War II, he returned to Harvard and did some graduate work in cultural anthropology and ethnology. After the war began, he was drafted into the Army but got out after only three months. According to the Miles biography, his mother used her influence to win his discharge for physical reasons.

By 1944, Mr. Burroughs had an apartment on Bedford Street in Greenwich Village and developed an addiction to heroin. Among those he befriended in New York in the 1940's were Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. It was from these three and their friends and acquaintances that the term Beat Generation would later be applied. And it was Mr. Ginsberg who, several years later, inadvertently came up with the title Naked Lunch. He got it from misreading a bit of manuscript in Mr. Burroughs's scrawl, which actually referred to "naked lust."

Mr. Burroughs's first book, published by Ace in 1953 under the pseudonym William Lee, was called Junkie and told of his years as an addict.

The writing of Junkie came after what was arguably the saddest part of Mr. Burroughs's life. He had married Joan Vollmer in 1945 and in 1951 they were living in Mexico City. He was then using drugs heavily and had returned to Mexico City from a trip to Ecuador, where he had tried to learn more about a hallucinogen called yage. His wife was addicted to Benzedrine and, according to Barry Miles, did not mind Mr. Burroughs's homosexual interests. Indeed, she had borne him a son.

Their life in Mexico City was not especially happy. One September afternoon in 1951, they began to drink with friends. Eventually, Mr. Burroughs, who was quite drunk, took a handgun out of his travel bag and told his wife, "It's time for our William Tell act." There never had been a William Tell act but his wife laughed and put a water glass on her head. Mr. Burroughs fired the gun. The bullet entered her brain through her forehead, killing her instantly. Mexican authorities concluded that it was an accident; Mr. Burroughs was convicted only of a minor charge and served little time in jail.

Years later, he would say that he would never have become a writer had it not been for her death. His wife's death, he said, "brought me into contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice but to write my way out."

The incident did not stop his drug use, and in his introduction to Naked Lunch, he describes his addiction: "I have smoked junk, eaten it, sniffed it, injected it in vein-skin-muscle, inserted it in rectal suppositories. The needle is not important." Mr. Burroughs wrote that during the time he was an addict, he did "absolutely nothing." He said, "I could look at the end of my shoe for eight hours." When he was 45 years old, he ended 15 years of addiction by taking apomorphine, a chemical compound developed in Britain.

His son, William, died in 1981. He is survived by his companion and manager, James Grauerholz, who remained at Lawrence Hospital and declined to take phone calls.

No other Burroughs book attracted the attention of Naked Lunch, but his works always interested the critics. In 1960, he started inserting shards of sentences and paragraphs from newspapers and other authors into his own prose because, he said, he wanted to break the patterns that one normally finds in a book and emulate the peripheral impressions experienced in life itself.

"I don't plan a book out. I don't know how it's going to end," he told one interviewer. He readily admitted there was considerable overlap of material in his books.

In 1989, he collaborated on a comic opera, The Black Rider, which was performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Opera House by the Thalia Theater of Hamburg and was based on Der Freischutz, a folk opera by Carl Maria von Weber. Mr. Burroughs wrote the libretto; Tom Waits wrote the songs, and it was staged by Robert Wilson. It was also produced in Europe. There were many other projects but some, like Ruski (1984), The Cat Inside (1986) and Ghost of a Chance (1991) were limited editions.

In his later years, he spent a great deal of time as a painter and calligrapher. He said he did a lot of painting "with my eyes closed," but there was interest in his art and sales of his works helped bail him out of the tough financial situation in which he found himself in the mid-1980's.

Only a week before his death, Mr. Burroughs had been helping to prepare selected writings to be published next year by Grove Press, Mr. Silverberg, the publicist, said. A reprinting of a novel, The Third Mind, is also scheduled by Grove Press for next year and last year Viking Press reissued My Education: A Book of Dreams.

A self-avowed animal-rights activist and environmentalist, he had been supporting a Duke University foundation dedicated to the survival of lemurs.

In a rare interview last November, Mr. Burroughs told The New York Times that he made entries in a journal each day but had given up formal writing, adding quietly, "I guess I have run out of things to say." He also said that he had temporarily given up painting. "I don't want to keep repeating myself," he said.

Several of his friends, fellow drug-users and contemporaries have died in the last two years, including Timothy Leary, Herbert Huncke and Allen Ginsberg.

To the end of his life, Mr. Burroughs remained pessimistic about the future for humankind. In Ghost of a Chance, he lamented the destruction of the rain forests and their creatures and wrote: "All going, to make way for more and more devalued human stock, with less and less of the wild spark, the priceless ingredient—energy into matter. A vast mudslide of soulless sludge."

The London Times (obituary date 4 August 1997)

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 was born in St Louis, Missouri, into the family of a famous industrialist. At Harvard during the New Deal years he studied poetry, ethnology and yoga, and gained a reputation for his wide-ranging knowledge. He travelled in Europe, studying medicine at Vienna University, and returned to Harvard to study postgraduate anthropology. He then rejected the bourgeois academic and scholarly life and entered the demi monde that was to shape his life.

Rejected for the US Army, he went through a variety of jobs, including those of private detective, pest controller, bartender, factory and office worker, advertising and "the edge of crime". It was a good training for a writer of his social range and peculiar gifts of mimicry. He developed his first drug habit at this time, and its frightening effects became central to his life and work. His experiences of drugs, crime and the police were fully documented in his first book, Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (1953), published under the pseudonym William Lee.

Addiction and withdrawal or cure were the central metaphors of his career. His concern with the analysis of power was based largely on his drug-dependence and concomitant dependence on pushers, and on his antagonism to narcotics agents.

After some time in New Orleans and Texas, he made anthropological journeys to South America in search of alien cultures and new varieties of drugs. In the later 1950s he lived in Tangier, and after a crisis there in 1956 he underwent the apomorphine cure under Dr John Yerbury in London. The Naked Lunch (1959), his most famous book, was written largely in Tangier afterwards. "I awoke from the Sickness at the age of forty-five," he wrote, "calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive the Sickness."

The Naked Lunch—an aleatory, anarchic fantasy about addiction and homosexuality—was acclaimed by Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell, but its monotonous and nauseating violence, scatology and sadism ensured that it was banned in America until 1962. It did not appear in Britain until 1964, by which time the failure of the Lady Chatterley case had freed publishing from most taboos. Like other "underground" writers, such as Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett, Burroughs was published by Olympia Press in Paris, Grove Press in America and John Calder in Britain. But Burroughs was no Beckett. While Beckett became famous for his fastidiousness about words, Burroughs used them casually, flippantly, and without compassion.

His ideas were shocking but shallow. "The whole system is completely wrong and heading for unimaginable disasters," he said. He claimed that there was a "necessity of deconditioning people from their whole past", and argued that "words are thought control". For a writer, who must begin with the inherited resources of language, this wholesale rejection was not promising.

His major theme was power as the manipulation of pleasure and pain in the human body. Around him he saw a systematic degradation in which people willingly submitted to becoming hosts of the parasites of rule. His targets were gangsters, judges, doctors, psychiatrists, policemen and servicemen. Fake sacrifices and cures, phoney panaceas and causes were his satirical targets, and yet he believed that people volunteered for exploitation. His work may have been a warning against the nature of power, but he saw human beings as irrevocably addicted to victimization by their overlords.

The Naked Lunch was followed by The Soft Machine (1961, final version 1968), The Ticket That Exploded (1962) and Nova Express (1964). Julian Symons's review of The Soft Machine summed up Burroughs's world: "The lovers bugger each other desperately, have nightmares in which they are violated by centipedes, and endure painful fantasies about the terminal erections of a hanged man. Out of the dirt, the excrement, the couplings, the repetitious confusion with which they are described, Burroughs makes a kind of dismal and disgusting urban poetry."

The confusion and repetition stemmed from Burroughs's "cut-up" method, which involved slicing up his typescripts and reassembling them—techniques demonstrated in two books of examples, The Exterminator! (1960, written with Brion Gysin) and Minutes To Go (1960, written with Brion Gysin, Sinclair Beiles and Gregory Corso). This form of dislocation was supposedly influenced by film and recording methods, but after Finnegans Wake and Gertrude Stein it was perhaps not so revolutionary and exciting as was made out.

Burroughs's subsequent career was spent between Tangier, Paris, New York and London, the main scenes of what Mary McCarthy called his carnival world. His experiences of South America emerged in The Yage Letters (1963), written to Allen Ginsberg, who contributed a letter of his own, and Burroughs also wrote of his drug experiences in a number of articles, the most significant of which was "Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness" (1960).

Newspaper column formats and ticker-tape structures appear in his Time (1965) and again in Apo-33 Bulletin A Metabolic Regulator (1967), which sought a way to re-establish individuality in the face of ideologies, miseducation and advertising.

Burroughs wrote a large number of shorter fictional pieces and articles on drug addiction and cure, but never, despite the popular myth, encouraged the indiscriminate use of drugs. He was, however, deeply interested in transformations of consciousness through both drugs and meditation. For a while he associated with Scientologists, in order to discover whether their methods were useful for the development of the self. His criticism of all such educational programs, plus some account of his own schemes for retraining the mind and body, are contained in the conversations of The Job (1970). The Wild Boys (1972) imagines a youth organization which has gained sole political power, a Spenglerian coming of the New Barbarians, self-generative and asexual.

His film script The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (1970) is based on the delirious dying testimony of the celebrated gangster, and reflects Burroughs's lifelong interest in cinema (he took part in two films based on his own work) and in the criminally pathological mind.

In his later work, science fiction techniques extended his vision of perpetual terrestrial strife into galactic conflicts, but in the 1970s his reputation and readership began to decline. His style and compositional method had been highly influential, but were more and more evidently one of modernism's culs-de-sac. The Burroughs family fortune had been based on the invention of the adding machine, but although he continued to write and publish into his eighties, it is unclear what it all added up to.

William Burroughs married Joan Vollmer in 1945, but in Mexico in 1951 he accidentally shot her, reportedly while playing William Tell. His son died in 1981.

Achy Obejas (obituary date 4 August 1997)

SOURCE: "Beats' Burroughs Survives in Pop, Gay Culture," in Chicago Tribune (online publication), August 4, 1997.

[In the following obituary, Obejas appreciates Burroughs's influence on modern music and art.]

"But I'm dying," says William Burroughs in his flat, unflinching voice on the song, "Interlude 3 (The Vultures are Gone and Will Never Come Back)," a collaboration with the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy. Then, with just a hint of a smirk in his voice, Burroughs adds, "No, you're not."

Burroughs, one of the founding figures of the Beat Generation, actually died Saturday in Lawrence, Kan., after a heart attack. He was 83. But anyone who thinks that's the end of him doesn't understand the effect Burroughs continues to have on literature and popular culture.

"He's turning out to be have been enormously influential, especially on artists who go into the inferno and report back," said James McManus, author of the novel Going to the Sun, last year's Carl Sandburg award winner. "He was into sex and drugs and rock n' roll before anybody else. And his influence on gay literature is immeasurable."

Burroughs' Naked Lunch is considered a landmark book, even though its publication in 1959 prompted Dame Edith Sitwell to label it "filth." Other writers, including Mary McCarthy and Norman Mailer, hailed Burroughs as a genius.

"It's a satire on the evils of government and the uniquely American conflict between independence and control," said Barry Silesky, a magazine editor and author of a biography of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, another Beat Generation writer.

Naked Lunch was nonetheless the subject of a long-running obscenity trial, which concluded in 1962, generating enough publicity for a re-issuing of the book by Grove Press, literary home of both Burroughs and Beat pal Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg died four months ago.

Burroughs' third book is a hallucinogenic feeding frenzy, with unlikely characters such as the Shoe Store Kid and the Lobotomy Kid. In one passage, a man is consumed by his own anus; in others, mad scientists perform a series of parodic operations. Burroughs' over-the-top style, influenced by his longtime heroin addiction, often bypassed literary staples such as plot, narrative and characterization in favor of an urgent, visceral approach.

"The study of hieroglyphic languages shows us that a word is an image," said Burroughs in 1969. "The written word is an image."

In that vein, Burroughs pioneered a writing style called "Cut-Ups," in which he cut up pieces of his own writing, mixed it with text from other sources, then glued it back together. For all the surreal and shocking subject matter of his work, Burroughs' tall, trim figure served as contrast. Often wearing white suits and a fedora, Burroughs rarely smiled, preferring instead an affectless demeanor that suggested gentility.

In 1981, he was invited to read from Naked Lunch and another work, The Soft Machine, on Saturday Night Live. As Burroughs read, "The Star Spangled Banner" played.

In recent years, Burroughs had been collaborating with musicians, including Sonic Youth, John Cale, Donald Fagen, Marianne Faithful, Brian Jones, Tom Waits, Kurt Cobain, Michael Franti, Ravi Shankar, and Laurie Anderson. He had a significant influence on others such as Lou Reed, Throbbing Gristle, Bob Mould, Jesus Lizard and producer Steve Albini.

His last CD, Spare Ass Annie, was released in 1993, a pulsating, danceable collection of stories told in Burroughs' staticky voice.

"It's one of the great American voices of the century, in terms of its tonal qualities—literally, how it sounded, regardless of what he said," explained McManus, a writing professor at the School of the Art Institute and whose own works, particularly Chin Music, were inspired in part by Burroughs.

One rocker who certainly thought of Burroughs' voice as unique is Chicagoan Al Jourgensen of Ministry, who used the Beat poet on a CD single called "Just One Fix." "Smash the control images, smash the control machines," intones Burroughs on the 1992 release.

Burroughs' rock n' roll legacy, however, goes beyond his vocalizing. He is credited as the first person to use the term "heavy metal" in relationship to music. The Mugwumps, a 1963 band formed by the Lovin' Spoonful's John Sebastian, took its name from a Burroughs novel. Steely Dan was named after a metallic dildo in Naked Lunch. And '70s progressive band Soft Machine won Burroughs' permission to name itself after his novel.

Since the beginning of his writing career, Burroughs also demonstrated a separate interest in visual arts. He did the first dust jacket for Naked Lunch; the cover of "Just One Fix" is a Burroughs painting titled "Last Chance Junction and Curse on Drug Hysteria." Last year, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art organized his one-person show of works on paper, collage, photography, installation and paintings.

In Man from Nowhere, a biography of Burroughs by Joe Ambrose, Terry Wilson and Frank Rynne, the authors describe how Burroughs discovered one of his painting techniques: "In 1982, (he was) trying out some guns at a friend's place, using a double-barreled 10 gauge shotgun with an 18 inch barrel…. He had been shooting at pieces of plywood, and he found that different layers of wood had been exposed on different parts of the plywood … He tied cans of spray paint in front of the pieces of wood and blasted away with the gun. The inevitable explosions of garish and tactile color pleased Burroughs … Burroughs had changed writing with the Cut-Ups. Now he was applying the same random spirit to the world of art."

His first customer was Timothy Leary, who paid $10,000 for a painting. Cobain and other members of Nirvana were later customers. In his October 1988 show in Chicago, his works sold at prices between $1,500 and $10,000.

Burroughs was born February 5, 1914 in St. Louis, grandson and heir of the inventor of the Burroughs adding machine. He was educated in private schools and served as a glider pilot trainee for three months during World War II. Burroughs claims he began writing after shooting his second wife, Joan Vollmer, to death while playing a William Tell game. Their son William died in 1981 of cirrhosis of the liver. Burroughs is survived by longtime companion James Grauerholz.

Tunku Varadajan (obituary date 4 August 1997)

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 hucksters. The book was the subject of numerous censorship trials. Although written in 1959, it did not go on sale in America until 1962.

Although many found it unreadable at first, Naked Lunch eventually came to be recognized as a "stream of consciousness" classic. Critics have described Burroughs' his style as "non-linear", which is an elegant way of saying anarchic.

Burroughs also wrote Junkie (1953), The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket that Exploded (1962) and Nova Express (1964).

Burroughs' happiest times were spent in Tangier in the 1950s, where he had easy access to drugs and boys. He befriended a Dutch sea-captain who ran a male brothel, moved into his home, and scoured the alleyways. "I get averages of ten very attractive propositions a day," he said.

Martin Weil (obituary date 4 August 1997)

SOURCE: "Beat Author William S. Burroughs Dies at 83," in The Washington Post, August 4, 1997, p. B4.

[In the following essay, Weil summarizes the highlights of Burroughs's life and career.]

William S. Burroughs, 83, whose efforts to transmute into literature the events and visions of a tormented life earned him fame as an artistic innovator and a founder of the Beat Generation, died Aug. 2 in Kansas.

Mr. Burroughs, who had resided since the early 1980s in Lawrence, Kan., after a knockabout life on four continents, died at Lawrence Memorial Hospital. He had been admitted Aug. 1 after a heart attack.

Much of Mr. Burroughs's enduring literary fame rests on Naked Lunch, the controversial 1959 novel that was hailed for groundbreaking creativity and denounced as vile filth.

In that book and in later writing, Mr. Burroughs employed a highly personalized stream-of-consciousnessstyle to which literary critics have traced much of the work that characterized the authors of the Beat Generation.

Along with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, whom he was credited with introducing to each other, Mr. Burroughs was regarded as one of the three literary mainstays of the Beat movement. That movement exercised a profound effect on the culture of young people in the 1960s and ultimately on the wider culture, as well.

Filled with nightmarish, surreal, corrupt images of living matter, Naked Lunch seemed off-putting and even revolting to many students of literature. Others, however, believed that Mr. Burroughs used his surreal imagery, its polymorphous insects and intestines, to serve as a vast metaphor for his central vision.

It aimed, British critic Tony Tanner once said, to stand for the variety of ways mankind is devoured in the modern world, and, according to New York literary scholar Morris Dickstein, it served as a model "for younger writers trying to break through the standard realistic method."

Mr. Burroughs's work was in many ways closely connected with a life that included firsthand familiarity with society's underside, years of heroin addiction and a tragic incident in Mexico in which, after hours of taking drugs and drinking, he accidentally shot and killed his wife.

Just the same, Mr. Burroughs's own life was one of paradox and of unexpected departures and deviations from the images and expectations created by his art and vision. St. Louis-born, he was the grandson and namesake of the man who invented the adding machine, or at least, said Mr. Burroughs, "the gimmick that made it work."

The literary, personal and psychological odyssey of his life, a voyage through New York's literary communities, to Mexico, to the jungles of the Amazon basin, to the exoticism of Tangiers, finally took him to Lawrence.

A friend, Richard Gwin, a photographer for the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper, said Mr. Burroughs had a bungalow with a large yard "and sort of faded into the community." One of Mr. Burroughs's cats was buried in the yard under a tombstone with the cat's name on it, Gwin said.

In the 1980s, Gwin said, Mr. Burroughs and Ginsberg, wearing ear protectors, would shoot at targets with a pistol when Ginsberg came to visit.

Mr. Burroughs had a circle of friends but lived in seclusion "in a lot of ways," Gwin said. "Maybe that's what he wanted."

Indeed, in his speech, appearance and demeanor, Mr. Burroughs appeared to belie his reputation for iconoclasm and the unconventional. While his fellow Beats were histrionic in declaiming their work from the lecture platform, Mr. Burroughs presented "very much a style of his own," said Dickstein, a professor of literature at City University of New York, who wrote a book on the literature of the 1960s.

He was dry, poker-faced, antiseptic and "always very well dressed," Dickstein said. And in his quiet way, Dickstein said, Mr. Burroughs was "very funny."

Not even Mr. Burroughs's descent from a member of the nation's pantheon of industry and achievement counted for much in his life. Only vestiges of the family fortune survived the Wall Street crash of 1929. His mother, described as a member of the southern aristocracy, may, according to students of his work, have cultivated in him a degree of misogyny that marked his life.

He attended private schools, found his way as a young man to the fringes of the drug world and, in 1936, graduated from Harvard University with a degree in English. Afterward, he traveled to Europe, where he met and married a woman of Jewish extraction to help her emigrate and escape the Nazis. The marriage was dissolved after they reached this country.

Mr. Burroughs served briefly in the Army during World War II, was discharged for medical reasons and, by 1944, had become addicted to heroin; concern about legal problems prompted his move to Mexico with his second wife, Joan Vollmer, whom he later shot.

They had a son who died in 1981.

Eventually, a British doctor was credited with breaking Mr. Burroughs of his heroin addiction, ending what he said were years of "staring at the toe of my foot" and opening the way for him to write. Naked Lunch appeared in Europe in 1959 and, after overcoming efforts to censor it, was published in the United States three years later.

His work often incorporated random observations sometimes inserted into the manuscript with scissors and paste, creating a stream-of-consciousnes style. It all had an overarching purpose, he once said:

"To make people aware of the true criminality of our times. To wise up the marks."