William Seward Burroughs

Born in St. Louis, long expatriated in Paris and elsewhere, best known for his frank accounts of his life as a drug addict, begun under the pseudonym of William Lee in Junkie (1953) and continued in The Naked Lunch (Paris, 1959; New York, 1962), a bitter existential account of an addict's life and a surrealistic evocation of the subjective horrors involved. Other works, showing a relation to the Beat movement, include The Exterminator (1960); The Soft Machine (Paris 1961); The Ticket That Exploded (Paris, 1962); The Yage Letters (1963), correspondence with Allen Ginsberg and Nova Express (1964), another macabre novel.