About the Author

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS was born into a prominent St. Louis family in 1914 and would go on to be one of the most innovative and controversial writers of the twentieth century. He was a founding father of the Beat Generation alongside Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Jack Kerouac.

Reviews

Praise for William S. Burroughs: "A creator of grim fairy tales for adults, Burroughs spoke to our nightmare fears and, still worse, to our nightmare longings . . . More than any other postwar wordsmith, he bridged generations; popularity in the youth culture is greater now than during the heady days of the Beats."-Los Angeles Times Book Review "Of all the Beat Generation writers, William S. Burroughs was the most dangerous . . . He was anarchy's double agent, an implacable enemy of conformity and of all agencies of control-from government to opiates."--Rolling Stone "Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American."--Joan Didion "William was a Shootist. He shot like he wrote--with extreme precision and no fear."--Hunter S. Thompson "The most important writer to emerge since World War II . . . For his sheer visionary power, and for his humor, I admire Burroughs more than any living writer, and most of those who are dead."--J. G. Ballard "Burroughs seems to revel in a new medium . . . A medium totally fantastic, spaceless, timeless, in which the normal sentence is fractured, the cosmic tries to push its way through the bawdry, and the author shakes the reader as a dog shakes a rat."--Anthony Burgess