BY THE TIME of his death in 1997, William S. Burroughs had achieved something that very few figures ever manage: He had become supra-human, a living, livid symbol. Only Burroughs’s own name can unite such disparate activities, output, and stances: writer, murderer, painter, junkie, public commentator, cultural critic, concept engineer. In addition to changing the face of literature, exploding the craft’s lexicon of possibilities with his early work, he redefined the role of the public intellectual, becoming his own creation, an “antillectual” who rebuffed even those countercultural movements that claimed him as one of their own.
A hero to artists, philosophers, junkies, and sexual outsiders, Burroughs created work that brought together spheres that tend to function as in-clubs, thereby illuminating the heavy regimentation of the social nexus. Burroughs’s universe was where the art world met the criminal nether regions, where the liberation movements were forced to confront the gun lover, where irruptions of collectivity were shot down by the erratic impulses of a pronounced anarcho-individualism, where punk rock wore a suit and tie.
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