Burroughs, William S.

Burroughs, William S. (Seward)

(1914– ) writer; born in St. Louis, Mo. Heir to the Burroughs business machine fortune, he was a Harvard-educated sometime medical student, private detective, and exterminator. In the late 1950s he became associated with the Beat writers in New York City. He later lived mostly in Paris and Tangier, Morocco, and admitted to being addicted to heroin. His two dozen books controversially blended homosexuality, science fiction, and underworld seaminess; later works experimented radically with language. Naked Lunch (Paris, 1959; New York, 1962) remains his best known work.