Author. He was an American author during the Beatnik era of the 1950s and the hippies of 1960s, who was briefly known by the pen name William Lee. He wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays, and five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. Born to the wealthy Laura Lee and Mortimer Burroughs, he was named after his famous grandfather, an inventor who was a pioneer in adding-machine technology. He attended prep schools and later studied English literature at Harvard University, where he graduated in 1936. He was gifted a monetary allowance from his parents which afforded him freedom from regular employment. He traveled to Europe and met and married German Jewish woman, Ilse Klapper, for the purpose of allowing her escape from antisemitic Nazi Forces to the United States, and upon reaching the United States, the two ended the union. During World War II, he enlisted after Pearl Harbor yet was not made an officer as he expected, became depressed, and received a civilian disability discharge related to past mental health issues. He eventually traveled to New York studying a Columbia University and met writers Allen Ginsberg and "Jack Kerouac in the mid-1940s. The three would be heralded as starting the Beat Movement, an artistic outpouring of nontraditional, free expression. He and Kerouac authored the novel "And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks," which was rejected by publishers for years until 2008. Much of his work is semi-autobiographical, primarily drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict, as he lived throughout Mexico City, London, Paris, Berlin, the South American Amazon and Tangier in Morocco. In the introduction to "Queer", a novel written in 1953 yet not published until 1985, he states, "I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would have never become a writer but for Joan's death, so the death of Joan brought me into contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I had no choice except to write my way out". He accidentally killed Joan Vollmer in 1951 in Mexico City, and was consequently convicted of manslaughter in a trial of absentia, receiving a two-year suspended sentence. He had relocated to Mexico to escape being sentence up to five years in Louisiana's Angola Prison after being convicted on heroin possession. He and Vollmer had a son. The films "Naked Lunch" in 1991 and "Beat" in 2000 describes his relationship with Vollmer. Finding success with his confessional first novel, "Junkie" in 1953, he is perhaps best known for his third novel "Naked Lunch" in 1959, a controversy and fraught work that underwent a court case under the United States sodomy laws. With Brion Gysin, he also popularized the literary cut-up technique in works such as "The Nova Trilogy." In 1983, he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1984 was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French minister of culture. He faced another family tragedy when his only child, William Seward Burroughs III, an author, succumbed to substance addiction, had a liver transplant in 1976 for liver failure and died from alcohol-related complications in 1981 at age 33.