William S. Burroughs

Working in a prose style that was furious, funny, repellent, and relentlessly experimental, William S. Burroughs gouged into the foundations of complacent, conformist America while challenging the machinations of literature itself. Fearlessly starting from an outsider's position, both as a former drug addict and as a homosexual, Burroughs worked to expose and dismantle all forms of control or containment that were prevalent in contemporary culture with a devilish glee that glows off every page he wrote. Yet while his early works assault the reader with intentionally shocking imagery and stylistic techniques that yield varying degrees of success, it is his later works that perhaps offer the most surprises--and for the least likely reasons. At work in most of Burroughs' late-era fiction is a balance between visions of anarchic future worlds and nostalgia-tinged visions of the past—not just his own, but a child's vision of the past; one of pirates, of cowboys and Indians, of Egyptian gods and goddesses—expressing his yearning for the childhood he once had and perhaps for one that he never had. In these unexpectedly moving, yet never sentimental, final books, Burroughs reveals himself to be a writer of profound solemnity and startling grace who was finally ready to release the sadness beneath his anger.