Exactly one hundred years after he was born, William Burroughs has become more myth than man
The Telegraph - 05 Feb 2014
William S Burroughs: occult guru; drug-soaked crank; literary genius; dystopian visionary; violent psychopath. No writer of the post-war period has been so thoroughly mythologised. He was Old Bull Lee, El Hombre Invisible and Morphine Minnie. He cut off his own finger, he shot his wife and he took every drug he could find. Skin stretched over his skull, hair side-parted, stiff-postured in his three-piece suit, his unsettling intensity hums in every photographic portrait.
The myth was born at the beginning. In 1953, when he published Junky, his first book, he did so under the pseudonym William Lee. His friend and agent Allen Ginsberg wrote “an appreciation” of the book in which he promised that Burroughs’ true identity would “astonish many readers”.Ginsberg laid it on thick. “Little is known,” he wrote, about Burroughs’ student years at Harvard, aside from his “startling penchant for wildness”, and that he kept a “weasel on a chain”. It was, of course, nonsense. There was no weasel – it was a ferret.
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