William S. Burroughs, Jr
William S. Burroughs, Jr., born in 1947 in Conroe, Texas, was the son of the famous Beat writer William S. Burroughs and Joan Vollmer. His upbringing was marked by tragedy, particularly the death of his mother when his father accidentally shot her during a drunken incident while he was a child. This traumatic event shaped much of Burroughs's later writing, which includes his notable works "Speed" and "Kentucky Ham." Throughout his life, he struggled with substance abuse and personal issues, which he candidly documented in his literature.
Burroughs's early years were spent living with his grandparents before he moved to Morocco to be with his father, a relationship that was fraught with difficulties. Unlike his father, who often intellectualized hardship, Burroughs was deeply affected by his experiences, including encounters with addiction and the criminal justice system. After a series of tumultuous events and a significant health crisis related to his drinking, Burroughs continued to write until his death in 1983 from liver failure. His work, while influenced by the Beat movement, is characterized by a more individualistic perspective on addiction and mental health, focusing more on personal struggle than on broader social themes. Despite his rejection of organized religion, Burroughs's writings grapple with profound spiritual questions, revealing a complex inner life that invites further exploration.
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William S. Burroughs, Jr.
Writer
- Born: July 21, 1947
- Birthplace: Conroe, Texas
- Died: March 3, 1981
- Place of death: Orange City, Florida
Biography
William S. Burroughs, Jr., was the son of the influential Beat writer William S. Burroughs and his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer. Some confusion exists over the “junior” in his name. Burroughs’s father and grandfather had the same name, although his father’s name did not include the word “junior.” Because of the similarities in the names, Burroughs sometimes is referred to as William Burroughs III; his friends called him Billy Burroughs.
The younger Burroughs was born in Conroe, Texas, in 1947. He moved with his parents and half-sister to Louisiana and then to Mexico City, where in 1951 Burroughs’s father fatally shot his mother during a drunken game while the boy was watching. The traumatic and psychologically damaging incident was the first of many destabilizing life events that Burroughs would chronicle in his three major autobiographical and semiautobiographical works, Speed, Kentucky Ham, and the unpublished “Prakriti Junction.”
After his mother’s death, Burroughs went to live with his paternal grandparents, first in St. Louis, Missouri, and then in Palm Beach, Florida. His life with them was emotionally and financially secure, but the generation gap was pronounced, and in 1961, fourteen-year-old Burroughs traveled to Morocco to live with his father, who was then writing his novel, Naked Lunch (1962). His father apparently hoped his relationship with his son would improve, but young Burroughs’s experience in Morocco was troubled. His father introduced him to hashish and failed to protect him from the sexual propositions of adult men. Unlike his father, Burroughs was heterosexual, and these traumatic experiences with homosexual men further alienated father and son.
Burroughs returned to Florida, but his grandfather soon died and his grandmother, increasingly senile, was unable to prevent her grandson’s growing drug addiction. Burroughs ran away to New York City, where he was arrested twice and bailed out both times by his father’s friend, the poet Allen Ginsberg. Again unlike his father, who embodied the Beat tendency to intellectualize difficulty and view it as inherently artistic, the younger Burroughs was frightened and disturbed by his arrests and drug problems. He returned to Florida, graduating from high school but continuing to take drugs, preferring the amphetamines that had been his mother’s drug of choice.
At seventeen, Burroughs was arrested on drug charges and sentenced to rehabilitation at the Federal Narcotics Farm in Lexington, Kentucky. His father also had spent time in the facility, although voluntarily, and both men wrote about the experience, Billy in Kentucky Ham and his father in Junkie (1953). After his sentence, Burroughs enrolled in the Green Valley School in Orange City, Florida, a rehabilitation center run by the Reverend George von Hilsheimer. Hilsheimer became a lifelong friend and the most stable influence in Burroughs’s life. During Burroughs’s first summer at Green Valley, Hilsheimer sent him to work on a fishing boat in Alaska, an experience which also is chronicled in Kentucky Ham. Upon returning to the school, Billy met his wife, Karen Perry. They married in 1968, the same year Burroughs completed his first novel, Speed, which was based on his experiences as a New York runaway.
He completed his second novel, Kentucky Ham, in 1970, but at the same time he also began drinking heavily. He and Karen moved several times, from Savannah, Georgia, where they had originally settled close to her parents, to Florida, Colorado, and the Yucatán, Mexico. Karen worked as a waitress and at odd jobs while Burroughs supported them as much as possible by publishing magazine articles and poems. They divorced in 1974, and Burroughs returned to Colorado to study Buddhism at the Naropa Institute and to be near the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, where his father and Ginsberg spent their summers teaching.
He quickly lost interest in Buddhism and left Colorado for Santa Cruz, California, with his new companion Georgette Larrouy. He intended to stop drinking and write full-time, and he published several magazine articles, many capitalizing on his acquaintance with Ginsberg. His drinking habit continued, however, and shortly after the couple returned to Naropa in 1976, Burroughs suffered a near-fatal liver attack and survived only because an organ donor was available. He remained hospitalized for several months and never fully recovered, probably because he refused to stop drinking. He continued writing, working on his final book and publishing an article in Esquire magazine condemning and blaming his father for his troubled life.
In 1981, he stopped taking the antirejection drugs which had been prescribed after his transplant. He visited Hilsheimer in Florida but collapsed and died by the side of the highway in Orange City on March 3, with liver failure ruled as the cause of death.
Although less experimental, Burroughs’s writing is reminiscent of his father and the other Beat writers, especially in his concern with making sense of his experiences. The lifestyle and addictions he describes were contemporary with the cultural upheaval of the 1960’s, which was inspired largely by the Beat movement, and he is properly a second-generation Beat in style as well as in genetic provenance. However, he treats his experiences very individualistically; his characters are isolated psychologically and largely independent of social and even familial influence.
Although in Kentucky Ham he recalls his mother’s death and his first meeting with his father after the shooting, his books focus on his adult life far more than his childhood and adolescence. He ignores the major thematic concepts of the 1960’s—social consciousness and religious mysticism—in favor of a highly personal understanding of addiction and insanity. This individualistic character distinguishes him from both the Beats and the generation of activists they inspired. Although he overtly rejected religion, both of his published works contain pronouncedly spiritual themes, and in his last, unfinished work, he addresses this spirituality directly and begins to explore its significance.