William S. Burroughs
February 5, 1914 (St. Louis, Missouri.) ~ August 2, 1997
Happy Birthday
You would be
100
artist : al rossi
1953
william burroughs as "william lee"
"Burroughs never managed to recover from his addiction at all, and died
in 1997 physically dependent on the synthetic opiate methadone. I find
this a delicious irony: the great hero of freedom from social restraint,
himself in bondage to a drug originally synthesised by Nazi chemists,
and dubbed "Dolophine" in honour of the Fuhrer; the fearless libertarian
expiring in the arms of an ersatz Morpheus, actively promoted by the
federal government as a "cure" for heroin addiction. In the prologue to
Junky and the introduction to
The Naked Lunch,
Burroughs writes of his own addiction as if it were a thing of the
past, but this was never the case. In a thin-as-a-rake's progress that
saw him move from America to Mexico, to Morocco, to France, to Britain,
back to New York, and eventually to small-town Kansas, Burroughs was in
flight either from the consequences of his chemical dependency, or
seeking to avoid the drugs he craved."
— Will Self, "William Burroughs - the Original Junkie"
The Guardian, UK, 31 Jan '14
(Twelve, 2014)
736 pages
