His battle with addiction would be a lifelong struggle. Burroughs and Vollmer shared an apartment with Kerouac and his future wife Edie Parker.īurroughs began using heroin. These gatherings included future Beat Generation writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. He attended writing salons at the apartment of Joan Vollmer. (This later informed his novel Naked Lunch.)
MEXICAN GAY BAR SHOOTING SERIES
He embarked on a series of menial jobs including one as an exterminator. He grew depressed and was released from the military for mental instability. He enlisted in the army but was accepted as infantry, not an officer. (This inspired his short story “ The Finger”). In 1939, Burroughs cut off the joint of his left little finger above the knuckle to impress a man to whom he was attracted. Back in the states, they divorced and Burroughs continued his liaisons with men. Burroughs married Klapper in Croatia allowing her to obtain a visa. He also met Ilse Klapper, a Jewish woman fleeing the Nazis. In Austria, he became involved with Weimar-era gay culture and had liaisons with men in steam baths. This guaranteed his freedom and survival without needing to work for the next twenty-five years.īurroughs briefly attended medical school in Vienna. Burroughs received a $200 monthly allowance from family.
His family sold the rights to his grandfather’s invention just before the 1929 stock market crash. During this period, he traveled to New York and discovered the city’s gay subculture and underground club scene. He went to Harvard where he studied English and anthropology. He was sent to a boarding school for the wealthy in New Mexico where he wrote in his journal about his attraction to boys. He also discovered an interest in magic and the occult, claiming to see “ghostly grey figures at play” in his bedroom. He published his first essay Personal Magnetism in 1915 in his high school journal. Surrounded by wealth, he began writing in his early teens. His maternal grandfather was a minister who was close friends with Robert E. Louis, grandson of the inventor of the adding machine and founder of the Burroughs Corporation. In his autobiographical novel Queer, he wrote: “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never become a writer but for Joan’s death…the death brought me into contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I had no choice except to write my way out.”īurroughs was born in 1914 in St. The shooting haunted him the rest of his life. He was a junkie, he wrote Naked Lunch and he shot and killed his wife Joan Vollmer. William Burroughs is largely known for three things.