Authors: William S Burroughs
William S Burroughs was born in 1914 in St Louis, Missouri. That is his home town, as he lived there until he was 19 years old. At that age, he went to New York to work as a cub reporter and also going to Harvard.
Burroughs had an elegant upbringing and he lived in a three storey Victorian house. His parents were extremely well educated.
When he graduated from Harvard, he spent his 20s travelling in Germany and married a lady name Ilse. This was his first wife. He explored the gaudy seedy sexual world of post World War One Germany.
Throughout the Second World War, William S Burroughs lived in New York working at a variety of jobs as well as living on a family retainer as he was one of the scions of the Burroughs typewriter company. Burroughs got a monthly payout for $250 a month when the minimum wage was about a dollar an hour. In today's terms, that would be about $2,500 a month.
This gave him plenty of money to spend, as, in the summer of 1944, he started to develop an addiction to heroin.
William S Burroughs married a second wife after a legal separation from his first wife, and he had two children, one his one, and one child that was his wife's from her previous marriage.
William S Burroughs is one of my most favourite writers. He was very well travelled as he went to South America, specifically, Mexico City, Peru, and Colombia. He also spent ten years in Tangier smoking hashish. He lived for two years in London England, and stayed for about a year in Paris France. He lived in New York for about five years. He finally moved to Lawrence, Kansas. He lived in one house in Lawrence Kansas called the bunker because much of the house was basically a windowless basement. Then he moved into another house. The point is, he left his home town early in life and never went back there. I admire that.
He wrote a lot of books in a cut up style which was to paste together two halves of two different pages lengthwise and to derive a new text from that. I don't like and never read these kinds of writings of Burroughs.
However the writings of Burroughs which I do like are his straight prose. My favourite Burroughs books are Junky written during the beatnik era, Letters 1944 to 1959, Interzone, The Adding Machine and then My Education which is a book about dreams. Burroughs recorded his dreams in writings and this was a major influence.
Soundtrack:
Steely Dan
Boz Scags
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