William S. Burroughs was a seminal Beat Generation novelist who challenged literary conventions through his experimental work. He is best known for his 1959 novel Naked Lunch, which became a landmark case for free speech after overcoming obscenity charges. Despite a controversial past involving the 1951 killing of his wife, Joan Vollmer, he remains a key figure in American literary history for his innovative use of the cut-up technique.
William S. Burroughs: The Heir Who Shot His Wife and Broke the American Novel
On the night of 6 September 1951, in an apartment above a Mexico City bar, William Burroughs aimed a pistol at a glass balanced on his wife's head. The bullet struck Joan Vollmer in the head, and she died shortly afterward in hospital. Burroughs spent 13 days in jail, changed his story and walked out on bail. A Mexican court later convicted him in absentia and suspended his sentence. He went on to write *Naked Lunch*, defeat the censors and become the godfather of American literary rebellion. Decades later he put the darkest fact of his career in print himself: "I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death."
Old Money, Wrong Son
He was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on 5 February 1914, into a name stamped on office machines across America: his grandfather and namesake had founded the Burroughs Adding Machine company. The grandson wanted no part of business. He took a degree in English at Harvard in 1936, studied medicine in Vienna the next year, then drifted. The Army let him go after three months. He worked as a private detective, a bartender, an exterminator and a newspaper reporter. By 1944 he was addicted to morphine.
The Apartment Where the Beats Began
New York gave him an audience. Its headquarters was an apartment near Columbia University shared by two young women, Edie Parker and Joan Vollmer. Vollmer had grown up in Loudonville, New York, and studied journalism at Barnard College. She was known for a quick, combative intelligence, and her living room became the place where Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr and Burroughs argued about books, philosophy and the world. In 1944 Carr killed David Kammerer, and Burroughs was questioned as a witness. From about 1946 Burroughs and Vollmer lived as common-law husband and wife. Their son, William Jr., known as Billy, was born in 1947.
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Drugs brought the police, and Burroughs kept moving. He left New York to avoid a narcotics arrest and settled the family in Texas, then in Louisiana. There he was arrested for drunk driving, and later for drug possession and illegal firearms. Rather than face trial, he fled to Mexico in 1949 and enrolled at Mexico City College.
Monterrey 122
The shooting happened during a drinking party in an upstairs apartment at Monterrey 122, in the Roma district, above the Bounty Bar. Burroughs and Vollmer had both been drinking. He told her to balance a glass on her head, a stunt he called his William Tell act, and fired. At his arrest he was reported to have described the stunt. With the help of Bernabé Jurado, a notorious Mexico City defense lawyer, the account changed: the gun, Burroughs now said, had slipped and gone off by accident. Reports of the case say money changed hands. After 13 days in Lecumberri prison he was free on bail.
In 1952 Jurado fled Mexico after a fatal shooting of his own, and Burroughs left too. The court convicted him in absentia of homicide, a charge variously reported as negligent or culpable homicide, and imposed a two-year suspended sentence. He never served it.
The Woman at the Center
Joan Vollmer was not a footnote to the Beat Generation. She was one of its first hosts and one of its sharpest minds, and she was the mother of two children, a daughter from an earlier marriage and Billy. About a year before she died she had filed for divorce; it was never finalized. She was buried in Mexico City's Panteón Americano. Billy, four years old when his mother was killed, was sent to live with his grandparents. He died in 1981, at 33, after years of drinking had destroyed his liver.
Tangier, Paris and a Book on Trial
By the mid-1950s Burroughs was living in Tangier, still fighting addiction and writing the fragments that became *Naked Lunch*. The Paris publisher Olympia Press, which had first turned the book down, brought it out in July 1959 after excerpts appeared in American literary magazines. Grove Press printed an American edition and released it in 1962. Massachusetts went to court to suppress it, and in March 1965 a Superior Court judge declared it obscene. On 7 July 1966 the state's Supreme Judicial Court reversed him and ruled that *Naked Lunch* could not be declared obscene.
Scissors and Static
His method grew stranger. The painter Brion Gysin introduced him to the cut-up, slicing pages and splicing the fragments into new text, and Burroughs built three novels on it: *The Soft Machine* (1961), *The Ticket That Exploded* (1962) and *Nova Express* (1964). His earlier books surfaced on their own schedule. *Junkie* had appeared in 1953 as a paperback under the name William Lee. *Queer*, written in the early 1950s, was not published until 1985; its introduction carried his confession about Joan. Later came *Cities of the Red Night* (1981), *The Place of Dead Roads* (1983) and *The Western Lands*.
The Elder Statesman of Outrage
He spent his last years in Lawrence, Kansas, with his secretary and companion, James Grauerholz. The establishment came to him: in 1983 he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He made paintings and shotgun art, and in 1996 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art surveyed his visual work in *Ports of Entry*. He turned up on screen, too, in *Drugstore Cowboy* among other films. He died of a heart attack in Lawrence on 2 August 1997. He was 83.
On Screen and in Print
- Burroughs: The Movie (1983), documentary, directed by Howard Brookner; Burroughs appears as himself.
- Naked Lunch (1991), feature film, directed by David Cronenberg; Peter Weller plays William Lee, the pen name and alter ego Burroughs used for himself, and Judy Davis plays Joan Lee/Joan Frost.
- Kill Your Darlings (2013), feature film, directed by John Krokidas; Ben Foster plays Burroughs in the story of the 1944 killing that engulfed his Columbia circle.
- Queer (2024), feature film released by A24, directed by Luca Guadagnino from Burroughs's novel; Daniel Craig plays William Lee.
Why William S. Burroughs Is Called a Genius
Because the work changed what a novel could be. *Naked Lunch* broke narrative into shards, dared a state to call it filth, and won. The cut-up turned editing into invention, and artists in every medium have borrowed it since. That is why Burroughs appears on Geniuses.club. It is not the whole story, and it is not the most important part. Joan Vollmer was a gifted woman in her twenties with two children. She died because a drunk man with a loaded pistol treated her life as a party trick. Burroughs never served his sentence. He later wrote that her death made him a writer. That is a confession, not an excuse. The talent was real. So was the bullet.
Achievements
- Naked Lunch, first published in Paris in 1959, was declared obscene by a Massachusetts Superior Court judge in 1965; on 7 July 1966 the state's Supreme Judicial Court reversed the ruling and cleared t
- In September 1951 he shot and killed his wife, Joan Vollmer, in Mexico City; a Mexican court convicted him in absentia of homicide and imposed a two-year suspended sentence, which he never served.
- Published his first book, Junkie (1953), as a paperback under the pseudonym William Lee.
- Built the Nova trilogy, The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962) and Nova Express (1964), on the cut-up technique the painter Brion Gysin introduced to him.
- Was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983.
- Turned to visual art late in life; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art surveyed his work in the 1996 exhibition Ports of Entry.
- Was the grandson and namesake of the founder of the Burroughs Adding Machine company.
- Wrote, in his introduction to Queer (published 1985), that he would never have become a writer but for Joan Vollmer's death.
