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
