95 Facts About William Burroughs

William Burroughs 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".

William Burroughs was a grandson of inventor William Seward Burroughs I, who founded the Burroughs Corporation, and a nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee.

William Burroughs attended Harvard University, studied English, studied anthropology as a postgraduate, and attended medical school in Vienna.

William Burroughs found success with his confessional first novel, Junkie, but is perhaps best known for his third novel, Naked Lunch.

William Burroughs killed his second wife, Joan Vollmer, in 1951 in Mexico City.

William Burroughs later told investigators that he had been showing his pistol to friends when it fell and hit the table, firing the bullet that killed Vollmer.

William Burroughs lived variously in Mexico City, London, Paris and the Tangier International Zone near Morocco, and traveled in the Amazon rainforest, with these locations featuring in many of his novels and stories.

In 1983, William Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

William Burroughs was born in 1914, the younger of two sons born to Mortimer Perry William Burroughs and Laura Hammon Lee.

William Burroughs' mother was Laura Hammond Lee William Burroughs, whose brother, Ivy Lee, was an advertising pioneer later employed as a publicist for the Rockefellers.

William Burroughs later described how he saw an apparition of a green reindeer in the woods as a child, which he identified as a totem animal, as well as a vision of ghostly grey figures at play in his bedroom.

William Burroughs then attended the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, which was stressful for him.

William Burroughs kept journals documenting an erotic attachment to another boy.

William Burroughs finished high school at Taylor School in Clayton, Missouri, and in 1932 left home to pursue an arts degree at Harvard University, where he was affiliated with Adams House.

William Burroughs disliked the work, and refused to cover some events, like the death of a drowned child.

William Burroughs lost his virginity in an East St Louis, Illinois brothel that summer with a female prostitute whom he regularly patronized.

William Burroughs visited lesbian dives, piano bars, and the Harlem and Greenwich Village homosexual underground with Richard Stern, a wealthy friend from Kansas City.

William Burroughs' parents sold the rights to his grandfather's invention and had no share in the William Burroughs Corporation.

William Burroughs traveled to Europe and became involved in Austrian and Hungarian Weimar-era LGBT culture; he picked up young men in steam baths in Vienna and moved in a circle of exiles, homosexuals, and runaways.

William Burroughs made her way to New York City, and eventually divorced Burroughs, although they remained friends for many years.

William Burroughs enlisted in the US Army early in 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II.

In 1944, William Burroughs began living with Joan Vollmer Adams in an apartment they shared with Jack Kerouac and Edie Parker, Kerouac's first wife.

William Burroughs eventually sold heroin in Greenwich Village to support his habit.

William Burroughs fled to Mexico to escape possible detention in Louisiana's Angola state prison.

William Burroughs planned to stay in Mexico for at least five years, the length of his charge's statute of limitations.

William Burroughs shot Vollmer in the head, killing her almost immediately.

William Burroughs reported every Monday morning to the jail in Mexico City while his prominent Mexican attorney worked to resolve the case.

Nevertheless, the trial was continuously delayed and William Burroughs began to write what would eventually become the short novel Queer while awaiting his trial.

William Burroughs was convicted in absentia of homicide and was given a two-year suspended sentence.

An excerpt of this work, in which Burroughs and Kerouac wrote alternating chapters, was finally published in Word Virus, a compendium of William Burroughs' writing that was published by his biographer after his death in 1997.

Ace Books published the novel in 1953 as part of an Ace Double under the pen name William Burroughs Lee, retitling it Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict.

William Burroughs spent time with his parents in Palm Beach, Florida, and in New York City with Allen Ginsberg.

When Ginsberg refused his romantic advances, William Burroughs went to Rome to meet Alan Ansen on a vacation financed from his parents' continuing support.

William Burroughs found Rome and Ansen's company dreary and, inspired by Paul Bowles' fiction, he decided to head for the Tangier International Zone, where he rented a room and began to write a large body of text that he personally referred to as Interzone.

William Burroughs realized that in the Moroccan culture he had found an environment that synchronized with his temperament and afforded no hindrances to pursuing his interests and indulging in his chosen activities.

William Burroughs left for Tangier in November 1954 and spent the next four years there working on the fiction that would later become Naked Lunch, as well as attempting to write commercial articles about Tangier.

William Burroughs sent these writings to Ginsberg, his literary agent for Junkie, but none was published until 1989 when Interzone, a collection of short stories, was published.

Under the strong influence of a marijuana confection known as majoun and a German-made opioid called Eukodol, William Burroughs settled in to write.

William Burroughs began slicing up phrases and words to create new sentences.

New restored editions of The Nova Trilogy, edited by Oliver Harris and published in 2014, included notes and materials to reveal the care with which William Burroughs used his methods and the complex histories of his manuscripts.

William Burroughs moved into a rundown hotel in the Latin Quarter of Paris in 1959 when Naked Lunch was still looking for a publisher.

William Burroughs went to Paris to meet Ginsberg and talk with Olympia Press.

William Burroughs left behind a criminal charge which eventually caught up with him in Paris.

Paul Lund, a British former career criminal and cigarette smuggler whom William Burroughs met in Tangier, was arrested on suspicion of importing narcotics into France.

When it was published in this authentically random manner, William Burroughs liked it better than the initial plan.

International rights to the work were sold soon after, and William Burroughs used the $3,000 advance from Grove Press to buy drugs.

Also, poetry by William Burroughs' appeared in the avant garde little magazine Nomad at the beginning of the 1960s.

William Burroughs left Paris for London in 1960 to visit Dr Dent, a well-known English medical doctor who spearheaded a reputedly painless heroin withdrawal treatment using the drug apomorphine.

In 1968 William Burroughs joined Jean Genet, John Sack, and Terry Southern in covering the 1968 Democratic National Convention for Esquire magazine.

Southern and William Burroughs, who had first become acquainted in London, would remain lifelong friends and collaborators.

William Burroughs supported himself and his addiction by publishing pieces in small literary presses.

William Burroughs developed a close friendship with Antony Balch and lived with a young hustler named John Brady who continuously brought home young women despite Burroughs' protestations.

William Burroughs was skeptical of the organization itself, and felt that it fostered an environment that did not accept critical discussion.

William Burroughs successfully withdrew from heroin use and moved to New York.

William Burroughs eventually found an apartment, affectionately dubbed "The Bunker", on the Lower East Side of Manhattan at 222 Bowery.

William Burroughs added "teacher" to the list of jobs he did not like, as he lasted only a semester as a professor; he found the students uninteresting and without much creative talent.

Grauerholz had managed several rock bands in Kansas and took the lead in booking for William Burroughs reading tours that would help support him throughout the next two decades.

William Burroughs decided to relocate back to the United States permanently in 1976.

William Burroughs then began to associate with New York cultural players such as Andy Warhol, John Giorno, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and Susan Sontag, frequently entertaining them at the Bunker; he visited venues like CBGB to watch the likes of Patti Smith perform.

William Burroughs's father spent time in 1976 and 1977 in Colorado, helping Billy through additional surgeries and complications.

In London, William Burroughs had begun to write what would become the first novel of a trilogy, published as Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, and The Western Lands.

The trilogy featured time-travel adventures in which William Burroughs' narrators rewrote episodes from history to reform mankind.

William Burroughs had cut off contact with his father several years before, even publishing an article in Esquire magazine claiming his father had poisoned his life and revealing that he had been molested as a fourteen-year-old by one of his father's friends while visiting Tangier.

William Burroughs was in New York when he heard from Allen Ginsberg of Billy's death.

William Burroughs moved to Lawrence, Kansas in 1981, taking up residence at 1927 Learnard Avenue where he would spend the rest of his life.

William Burroughs was finally inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983 after several attempts by Allen Ginsberg to get him accepted.

William Burroughs collaborated with Tom Waits and director Robert Wilson on The Black Rider, a play that opened at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg in 1990 to critical acclaim, one that was later performed across Europe and the US In 1991, with Burroughs' approval, director David Cronenberg adapted Naked Lunch into a feature film, which opened to critical acclaim.

William Burroughs created file-folder paintings featuring these mediums as well as "automatic calligraphy" inspired by Brion Gysin.

William Burroughs originally used the folders to mix pigments before observing that they could be viewed as art in themselves.

William Burroughs used many of these painted folders to store manuscripts and correspondence in his personal archive Until his last years, he prolifically created visual art.

William Burroughs' work has since been featured in more than fifty international galleries and museums including Royal Academy of the Arts, Centre Pompidou, Guggenheim Museum, ZKM Karlsruhe, Sammlung Falckenberg, New Museum, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art.

In 1990, William Burroughs was honored with a star on the St Louis Walk of Fame.

William Burroughs became a member of a chaos magic organization, the Illuminates of Thanateros, in 1993.

William Burroughs was a voice actor in the 1995 video game The Dark Eye based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, in which he recites "Annabel Lee".

William Burroughs' last filmed performance was in the music video for "Last Night on Earth" by Irish rock band U2, filmed in Kansas City, Missouri, directed by Richie Smyth and featuring Sophie Dahl.

William Burroughs was a gun enthusiast and owned several shotguns, a Colt.

William Burroughs was a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment.

William Burroughs had a longstanding preoccupation with magic and the occult, dating from his earliest childhood, and was insistent throughout his life that we live in a "magical universe".

William Burroughs spoke openly about his magical practices, and his engagement with the occult is attested from a multitude of interviews, as well as personal accounts from those who knew him.

William Burroughs was unwavering in his insistence that his writing itself had a magical purpose.

William Burroughs was adamant that the technique had a magical function, stating "the cut ups are not for artistic purposes".

William Burroughs died August 2,1997, in Lawrence, Kansas, from complications of a heart attack he had suffered the previous day.

Since 1997, several posthumous collections of William Burroughs' work have been published.

William Burroughs produced numerous essays and a large body of autobiographical material, including a book with a detailed account of his own dreams.

William Burroughs clearly indicates here that he prefers to be evaluated against such criteria over being reviewed based on the reviewer's personal reactions to a certain book.

Always a contradictory figure, William Burroughs nevertheless criticized Anatole Broyard for reading authorial intent into his works where there is none, which sets him at odds both with New Criticism and the old school as represented by Matthew Arnold.

William Burroughs used photography extensively throughout his career, both as a recording medium in planning his writings, and as a significant dimension of his own artistic practice, in which photographs and other images feature as significant elements in cut-ups.

William Burroughs had an influence on the German writer Carl Weissner, who in addition to being his German translator was a novelist in his own right and frequently wrote cut-up texts in a manner reminiscent of William Burroughs.

William Burroughs continues to be named as an influence by contemporary writers of fiction.

William Burroughs is cited as a major influence by musicians Roger Waters, David Bowie, Patti Smith, Genesis P-Orridge, Ian Curtis, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Todd Tamanend Clark, John Zorn, Tom Waits, Gary Numan and Kurt Cobain.

Drugs, homosexuality, and death, common among William Burroughs' themes, have been taken up by Dennis Cooper, of whom William Burroughs said, "Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer".

William Burroughs had an impact on twentieth-century esotericism and occultism as well, most notably through disciples like Peter Lamborn Wilson and Genesis P-Orridge.

William Burroughs is cited by Robert Anton Wilson as the first person to notice the "23 Enigma":.

Furthermore, while William Burroughs was thinking about this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida, USA.

Some research suggests that William Burroughs is arguably the progenitor of the 2012 phenomenon, a belief of New Age Mayanism that an apocalyptic shift in human consciousness would occur at the end of the Mayan Long Count calendar in 2012.