William Seward Burroughs II was born 5 February 1914 in Saint Louis, Missouri, United States. He died on Saturday 2 August 1997.
Burroughs' sensory-overload style of writing has influenced a whole new generation of authors, among them William Gibson and the cyberpunk other scene. Full of seminal imagination, Burroughs' work has redefined the novel in the late 20th century.
Beat, Hippie, Punk (cyber or otherwise), Radical Crazy Mutant... every real advance in American writing is rooted in his work, or graced by the spectral gray image of his presence, Buster Keaton in banker's drag, dessicated junky prophet. Burroughs' writing is based on oral "routines", satiric or surreal monologues which later grow, expand, implode and fold in on themselves to produce the finished books.
-- Semiotext(e) SF 14, 1989)Burroughs is a beat legend, played guru, or teacher, to Kerouac and Ginsberg, has played with drugs, pistols, human life, human consciousness, a quicksilver daredevil with an extra-high IQ. Says of his work : "I write about what is in front of my senses at the moment of writing. I do not presume to impose story or plot or continuity". His underground novel Naked Lunch is a quick-shifting pinwheel of the modern scene; has mad biting humor and sections of technological horror that out-Orwell Orwell.
-- Seymour Krim (in The Beats, 1960)
