William seward Burroughs was born on February 5, 1914, in St. Louis, Missouri. After his graduation from Harvard, he lived in Chicago and New York, where He met Lucien Carr and Allen Ginsberg (see "And shocks of hospitals and jails and wars..." and "Moloch whose Soul is electricity...") and jack kerouac. Older than the others in the group, he took on the role of teacher, encouraging Kerouac and Ginsberg in their attempts to write fiction and poetry.

In the hope that he would feel at home in a "community of outlaws," Burroughs began buying stolen goods, including morphine Syrettes, and became addicted to morphine. In 1947 he moved to New Orleans, Texas, and Mexico City where drugs were more easily obtainable.

In 1950 Burroughs' old Harvard friend Kells Elvins visited him in Mexico City and talked him into writing a factual book about his drug experience as a "memory exercise." Burroughs set himself on a daily schedule, helped by injections of morphine. He titled his book Junky, and sent the manuscript to Lucien Carr in New York. Acting as an agent, Ginsberg was able to get the book published as a pulp paperback in 1953 under the pseudonym "William Lee".

IN 1951, Burroughs accidentally killed his wife, Joan Vollmer, and was charged in Mexico City with criminal imprudence. Released on bail, Burroughs left Mexico and traveled in South America looking for a drug called yage.

After Burroughs left South America, he settled in Tangier, where he could live cheaply and obtain the drugs he needed.

In February 1957 Kerouac came to visit him in Tangier and began to type the hundreds of handwritten pages of Burroughs' new book that Kerouac titled Naked Lunch.

Burroughs continued to work on the book until it's publication in 1959. Burroughs shared Ginsberg and Carr's "New Vision" of the writer as an outlaw and creating a "literature of risk."see also: "Rock and roll adolescents storm into..."
"The junk merchant does not sell..."
"we intend to destroy all dogmatic..."
naked lunch [movies]