The Junkie Genius Who Shot His Wife and Revolutionized Literature: William S. Burroughs at 112

On February 5, 1914, in a stuffy St. Louis mansion, a baby was born who would grow up to accidentally kill his wife during a drunken game of William Tell, become the godfather of counterculture, and write some of the most banned, reviled, and ultimately celebrated books of the twentieth century. Happy birthday, Bill.

William Seward Burroughs II came from money—his grandfather invented the adding machine that made the family fortune—but he spent most of his life running from respectability like it was a plague of giant centipedes (which, incidentally, feature prominently in his nightmares and his fiction). After Harvard, he drifted through a series of jobs that read like a surrealist résumé: exterminator, private detective, bartender, and eventually, full-time heroin addict. Most trust fund kids rebel by getting a tattoo. Burroughs went all in.

Let's address the elephant in the room—or rather, the bullet in Mexico City. In 1951, during a booze-soaked party, Burroughs told his common-law wife Joan Vollmer to put a glass on her head so he could play William Tell. She did. He missed. She died. He was charged with criminal negligence but eventually walked free after bribing Mexican officials. This tragedy haunted him for the rest of his life, and he later claimed it was the event that made him a writer. "I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death," he wrote. Dark? Absolutely. But Burroughs never pretended to be anything other than what he was.

His first novel, Junkie (1953), was published under the pseudonym William Lee and sold as a pulp paperback paired with another book about drug addiction—because apparently, publishers thought junkies read in bulk. The book is a brutally honest account of heroin addiction, written in spare, hard-boiled prose that owes more to Dashiell Hammett than to the flowery Beats he'd soon be associated with. It's the most conventional thing he ever wrote, and it's still more transgressive than ninety percent of what passes for edgy fiction today.

But Naked Lunch (1959) is where Burroughs truly lost his mind—and found his voice. Written in Tangier with the help of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac (who literally assembled scattered pages from Burroughs's floor), the book is a hallucinatory fever dream of talking anuses, sinister doctors, and something called the Interzone that's equal parts North African expat colony and metaphysical nightmare. The book was banned in Boston (of course) and Los Angeles, leading to obscenity trials that eventually established its literary merit. Norman Mailer called it "one of the ten most important American novels since World War II." Others called it pornographic garbage. Both were right.

What made Burroughs revolutionary wasn't just his subject matter—though writing openly about homosexuality, drug addiction, and murder in 1950s America took serious guts. It was his technique. Along with painter Brion Gysin, he developed the "cut-up method," literally taking scissors to pages of text, rearranging the fragments, and publishing the results. The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express form a trilogy of cut-up novels that read like transmissions from a parallel dimension where language itself has become a virus. "Language is a virus from outer space," he famously declared, and he meant it literally.

The Beats claimed him as one of their own, but Burroughs was always an uncomfortable fit. While Kerouac wrote about the road with boyish enthusiasm and Ginsberg howled about transcendence, Burroughs sat in corners looking like a Midwestern undertaker, coolly dissecting the control systems that he believed enslaved humanity. He was the dark id of the Beat Generation, the guy who made even the rebels nervous. When Kerouac and Ginsberg went mainstream, Burroughs went deeper underground, influencing everyone from David Bowie (who used the cut-up method for lyrics) to Steely Dan (named after a sex toy in Naked Lunch) to Nirvana (Kurt Cobain recorded with him shortly before dying).

Here's the thing about Burroughs that gets lost in all the scandal and avant-garde posturing: the man was genuinely funny. His deadpan delivery of the most outrageous scenarios—talking insects negotiating drug deals, mugwumps secreting addictive fluids, a man who taught his anus to talk and then got consumed by it—plays like cosmic black comedy. He described his aesthetic as "routines," essentially vaudeville bits pushed through a meat grinder of paranoia and junk sickness. Read aloud, much of Naked Lunch works as stand-up from hell.

In his later years, Burroughs became something of a cult celebrity. He appeared in Nike commercials (the irony was not lost on him), acted in films like Drugstore Cowboy, and recorded spoken word albums. He moved to Lawrence, Kansas, of all places, where he spent his final decades shooting guns, painting, and maintaining a heroin habit with the methodical precision of an accountant—which, given his family history, makes a certain twisted sense. He died on August 2, 1997, from a heart attack, having outlived most of his contemporaries through what can only be described as sheer ornery willpower.

So what's the legacy of this strange, cold, brilliant man who called himself El Hombre Invisible? Beyond the direct influence on punk, industrial music, and cyberpunk fiction (William Gibson's Neuromancer is unthinkable without Burroughs), he demonstrated that literature could be a weapon against control—against governments, corporations, and the very structure of language that shapes how we think. His paranoid visions of information control, viral marketing, and reality manipulation look less like science fiction every year. When you scroll through social media, dopamine-hooked and algorithmically herded, you're living in Burroughs's nightmare.

One hundred and twelve years after his birth, William S. Burroughs remains impossible to domesticate. You can't teach him in high school, can't make a feel-good biopic about him, can't reduce him to inspirational quotes. He's the writer as criminal, as outsider, as permanent threat to polite society. And that's exactly what literature needs—not comfortable affirmation, but the cold, lizard-eyed gaze of someone who sees through the whole rotten facade and has the words to burn it down. Happy birthday, you magnificent bastard. The virus is still spreading.