Biography
William Seward Burroughs was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1914 and graduated from Harvard University in 1936. In New York in the 1940s he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and he is regarded as a key figure of the Beat Generation. His first novel, “Junkie”, about his own drug addiction, appeared in 1953 under the pen name William Lee; two years earlier he had shot and killed his wife Joan Vollmer in Mexico City. His novel “Naked Lunch”, published in 1959, was prosecuted as obscene in Massachusetts until the state’s highest court cleared it in 1966; in the Nova Trilogy that followed (“The Soft Machine”, “The Ticket That Exploded”, “Nova Express”) he used the cut-up technique, in which fragments of text are cut apart and rearranged. For the stage he wrote the text of “The Black Rider”, which he developed with Robert Wilson and Tom Waits and which premiered at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg on 31 March 1990. Burroughs died in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1997.
On Stagelog
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