William S. Burroughs

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 that moment. Naked Lunch arrived in 1959 and landed in court, one of the last great obscenity trials in America. With Brion Gysin he pioneered the cut-up, slicing text into chance and reassembly, a method he pushed through The Nova Trilogy and later The Red Night Trilogy. By the 1980s he was in the Academy, decorated by France, collaborating with musicians, making shotgun art. He died in 1997, the substrata of American letters rewired.