William S. Burroughs — Profile, Rankings & Fame Trend

Summary

Updated 2026-06-10

He shot his wife, wrote on heroin, sliced up manuscripts with scissors, and got called a genius for it. Burroughs made addiction and chaos into a new kind of literature that couldn't be censored, imitated, or ignored.

Biography

About

Born into St. Louis money in 1914, Burroughs studied English at Harvard, then anthropology, then tried medical school in Vienna before the war pulled him toward the Army — which didn't want him. By 1942 he'd found morphine, then heroin, an addiction that would track him to the end. In 1943 he met Ginsberg and Kerouac in New York, the beginning of the Beat Generation. His first novel, Junkie, came out in 1953 under a pen name, but he'd finished it after accidentally killing his second wife, Joan Vollmer, in Mexico City in 1951 — a manslaughter conviction, suspended sentence, life in exile from…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs

said1986

Last night I encountered a dream cat with a very long neck and a body like a human fetus, gray and transluscent. I don't know what it needs or how to provide for it.

— The Cat Inside (1986)

William S. Burroughs

said1981

Faced by the actual practice of freedom, the French and American revolutions would be forced to stand by their words.

— Cities of the Red Night (1981)

William S. Burroughs

said1981

There is simply no room left for 'freedom from the tyranny of government' since city dwellers depend on it for food, power, water, transportation, protection, and welfare.

— Cities of the Red Night (1981)

William S. Burroughs

said1970

A paranoid man is a man who knows a little about what's going on.

— Quoted in Friends magazine (1970)

William S. Burroughs

said1965

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes.

— Quoted in interview, The Paris Review (Fall 1965)

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