American author born in St. Louis, Missouri. Burroughs came from a prominent family and was educated at the Los Alamos Ranch School, the most expensive private school in the United States at the time. He attended Harvard University and studied English and anthropology as a postgraduate student after which he went on to read medicine in Vienna. He moved to New York in 1944 and worked there as a bartender, copywriter, vermin exterminator and private detective while he developed a serious drug addiction. He also befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, among others, for whom he became something of a father figure. (Bull Lee in Kerouac’s novel On the Road, is based on Burroughs). At the end of the 1940s, Burroughs moved to Mexico, where he attended Mexico City College between 1948 and 1950. In 1951, he accidentally shot his second wife, Joan Vollmer, at a drunken party during a Wilhelm Tell-type game. He was acquitted after he had paid out bribes and hired the best lawyers. The couple’s only child, William Burroughs III, died at the age of thirty-three as a result of alcohol and drug abuse.