born Feb. 5, 1914, St. Louis, Mo., U.S.
died Aug. 2, 1997, Lawrence, Kan.
U.S. novelist.
The grandson of the inventor William S. Burroughs , he attended Harvard University and later became a member of the central group of the Beat movement . His experimental novels evoke, in deliberately erratic prose, a nightmarish, sometimes wildly humorous world. His early Junkie (1953) frankly describes his experiences as a heroin addict. The Naked Lunch (1959; film, 1991), his best-known work, is preoccupied with homosexuality and police persecution and vividly satirizes the grotesque world of the addict. (Burroughs accidentally killed his second wife while executing a drunken prank.) In his later novels, including The Soft Machine (1961), Nova Express (1964), The Wild Boys (1971), Cities of the Red Night (1981), and The Western Lands (1987), he further experimented with dystopian visions and radical technical devices.