There is likely no American writer who has directly impacted so many diverse cultural histories as William S. Burroughs (1914–1997), and this volume aims to chart his most prominent identities: founding member of the Beat Generation, expatriate writer, “obscene” novelist, experimental avant-garde artist, patron saint of heavy metal, early postmodernist, and godfather of punk and cyberpunk.

Burroughs is both a notorious figure in literary and cultural history and a major American writer and thinker of the twenty-first century; his life and writings defied the conventions of his time but nevertheless captured the contradictory spirit of the eras and places in which he lived. Burroughs’ life was long and variegated: He was born into wealth at the start of World War I in Midwestern America; he traveled throughout underworld circles and artistic scenes across the Americas, Europe, and North Africa; and he spent his last decades back in the Midwest, passing away at the end of the century in 1997. Burroughs’ first novels, such as Junky (1953) and Queer (written in 1952, only published in 1985), were groundbreaking in their explicit nature about homosexuality and drug use. Burroughs’ countercultural life and writing proved to be ahead of his time in both radical artistic experimentation and visionary prophecy.

Even so, the more sensational features of Burroughs’ life and work have been mythologized, celebrated, and in some cases denigrated to such an extent that his image – and all that his work represents – have long exceeded the boundaries of traditional literary history that focuses narrowly on the reception of published work. Despite his pop-culture celebrity, Burroughs remains a highly influential figure who also never fits a particular mold; Burroughs is simply too protean and, for some, too extreme to ever truly belong or to fit a clearly delineated label. His position within the Academy remains likewise controversial, even adversarial, and this volume aims to register that ambivalence by exploring a wide range of neglected and underexamined topics.

Burroughs was uniquely embedded in both the long twentieth century and the geographic locations where he lived and acted. Rather than being a “detached” novelist living in one place and publishing conventional stories, Burroughs was constantly writing and creating in reaction to his surroundings, producing writing and art on the cutting edge of the avant-garde and experimenting with emerging technologies for multimedia productions. Famous for practicing the “cut-up method” throughout the 1960s, Burroughs infamously destroyed or repurposed the writings of historical figures, famous authors, contemporary magazines, newspapers, and a wide range of other found texts, in order to create new works of fiction and visual art that could challenge the traditional roles and habits of the author and reader. An insightful thinker about contemporary culture, sensitive to (and entangled with) problems of world-historical significance, from imperialism to environmentalism, the story of William Burroughs as one of the great twentieth-century artists, thinkers, and revolutionaries is equally the story of his diverse contexts, a story of Western society seen from irreconcilable perspectives during the dramatic societal transformation spanning the post-World War II era.

As a queer artist who achieved great fame despite being known to his friends as “the invisible man” (“El Hombre Invisible”), Burroughs’ life and personality mirrored his writing style as it shifted over time. His literary output transformed in method and aesthetics nearly every decade as he experimented with novel artistic mediums and modes of communication. Burroughs transformed from the position of “novelist” in the early 1950s to an inventive avant-garde artist using cut-up methods in the 1960s, to a counterculture spokesperson in the 1970s. Despite these shifts, Burroughs’ reputation in American literary history has become overly associated with the Beat Generation, since he played a godfather role to the burgeoning Beat writers at a formative stage of their development (he also remained close with early collaborator Allen Ginsberg until the end of his life). Yet Burroughs became part of many other artistic communities and contributed to the growth of other lineages in American culture, ranging from “New Wave” science fiction to punk rock. Burroughs’ impact on American culture, furthermore, spanned far beyond the academic institutions that failed to fully comprehend his work. By the late 1960s, Burroughs became a public intellectual whose influence continued well into the 1990s, and beyond his passing. The posthumous adaptation of Burroughs’ oeuvre has spanned diverse contexts, like film and theater in America and Europe, as well as through posthumous archival publications of previously unseen materials, including numerous revised and restored editions of his most famous works.

Since Burroughs’ death in 1997, a renaissance of Burroughs scholarship and creative adaptations has flowered in America and Europe. Yet few books have attempted to grapple with the big picture, the broad context in which Burroughs lived and wrote. Nearly thirty years after Burroughs’ passing, amid an era of radical political upheaval, Burroughs in Context arrives at a fitting moment within the Cambridge University Press series. This volume builds on existing twenty-first-century scholarship to illuminate the lesser-known dimensions of Burroughs’ life and work within the cultural history and artistic movements that shaped the post–World War II era. William Burroughs in Context features chapters that explore the roles Burroughs inhabited and the communicative modes he adapted to critique and transcend the limitations of his space and time. Burroughs’ immense influence on contemporary popular, critical, and creative culture is central to these chapters, each of which focuses on an underexplored element of the primary “contexts” of his unusual life and writing, bringing to the foreground the influence he had on his contemporaries, and his unorthodox, often prophetic cultural and political insights.

Burroughs’ vision of the future in an age of accelerating technological transformation was informed by crisis and rupture – scenarios that often felt apocalyptic but never lost sight of the possibility for radical change. In this sense, Burroughs speaks directly to twenty-first-century anxieties and desires: to our looming social and ecological catastrophes and to our hopes for alternative realities that might emerge from the ruins. This is the larger context in which we situate Burroughs’ work, but before introducing this volume part by part, we begin with a case study that demonstrates, in microcosm, how Burroughs’ writing engaged with – and intervened in – multiple historical, political, and cultural currents, while also inventing something entirely its own.

Points of Intersection: “Roosevelt after Inauguration”

In May 1953, a nearly forty-year-old William Burroughs mailed a letter from Lima, Peru, to his friend Allen Ginsberg back in New York, together with the five-page manuscript of a short text called “Roosevelt after Inauguration.” Eventually, this would become one of Burroughs’ most popular routines, and its history serves as an ideal case study to illustrate the peculiar challenges of trying to put any of his work “in context.” To contemporary readers, the long literary history of “Roosevelt” might seem almost beside the point – because, with its portrayal of an American president trashing the Constitution, dismantling democratic institutions, and embodying the sadistic misanthropy of a fascist Roman emperor, Burroughs’ obscene and hilarious political satire reads as if it were written in 2026.

Because “Roosevelt” seems to speak with uncanny precision directly to the present moment, the routine exemplifies one of the aims of Burroughs in Context, which is to demonstrate the enduring relevance of his work – indeed, to argue that it has never been more urgently needed.¹ Another of the book’s aims, however, is to understand why it is also especially challenging to contextualize his work. It’s not just that “Burroughsian” resists easy definition because, across five decades, he produced an extraordinary variety of texts – none of which fit into established literary genres – that was published in an unusual variety of formats. Nor is it that his working methods were idiosyncratic and experimental. Nor is it that his literary work was only one form of creativity, along with photography, photomontage, painting, music, film, and audio tape, often made in collaboration with others. And nor, finally, is Burroughs’ work challenging to contextualize because it has almost always been mediated and often overshadowed by a highly controversial biography and legendary image. What makes Burroughs’ work especially, if not uniquely difficult to put in historical and cultural context is also, as we will see, its peculiar relationship to context itself.

To begin contextualizing “Roosevelt,” we would need to consider the text’s genetic history and circumstances of composition. Although “Roosevelt” has attracted substantial academic attention, critics have largely confined its contextualization to US politics of the 1930s; none have tried to situate the text geographically or historically as a product of Burroughs’ experience of South American politics and culture in the 1950s, evidence of the difficulty critics face when trying to connect his writing to place (see Eva Kowalska’s chapter, “The Exile,” in this volume). Describing in 1953 how he wrote the text, Burroughs raised two issues that deserve further research: “The idea did come to me in a dream from which I woke up laughing” (YL, 39). Dreams were important to Burroughs in themselves and as source material for writing – witness the last book published in his lifetime, My Education: A Book of Dreams (1995) – but also served as an ambiguous way to contextualize his work and frame its interpretation. Is “Roosevelt” less or more meaningful because it was “just” a dream, and a comic one at that? It might depend whether we see it in light of Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), and on how we situate the routine in terms of literary genre.

To ask what is the political point of “Roosevelt” is to ask one of the fundamental questions of Burroughs’ oeuvre in general. To call “Roosevelt” merely “satirical,” as most critics have done, implies the use of irony and black humor to serve a specific political position. On the other hand, “Roosevelt” embodies a form that may start from ironic humor but rapidly descends into a mayhem that destabilizes any clear meaning. The writers in this volume approach such indeterminacy from multiple angles: In the mid 1950s, Burroughs made extreme humor (see Katharine Streip’s chapter, “The Performer”) central to defining the affective and performative nature of “Roosevelt,” and indeed the form as a whole: You can’t “dig what a routine is,” he wrote, if you approach it with “the scholarly-type mind” that demands stable interpretation (L, 244). This disturbing excess makes the routine dreamlike in a specifically Surrealist sense (see David Banash’s chapter, “The Avant-Gardist”). Unlike satire, which implies a clear purpose, the intentionality of the routine therefore remains fundamentally inscrutable, which makes it the ideal aesthetic for Burroughs’ inscrutable image (see Steven Belletto’s chapter, “The Inscrutable Beat”). And yet critics have made compelling arguments for entirely opposite interpretations. Similarly polarized readings of Burroughs’ politics feature in numerous chapters here, often focused on his personification of the “Ugly American,” an imperial identity he developed contemporaneously with the writing of “Roosevelt.” Yet if one reason for the instability of interpretation is aesthetic, another is more material. Any approach to “Roosevelt” needs to reckon with the text’s most literal framing contexts: its multiple sites of publication. For many writers, such a backstory might seem incidental, but not in Burroughs’ case.² Indeed, tracing the full bibliographical record – from his enclosure of “Roosevelt” in a letter to Ginsberg in May 1953 to its appearance in the third edition of The Yage Letters in February 1988 – reveals at least a dozen publication or performance contexts, each with its own material and cultural story to tell.

Throughout the 1960s, the reception of “Roosevelt” was determined by censorship, which led to police action against one publication that printed it – Floating Bear magazine in 1961 – and to the text’s omission from two other publications: Kulchur magazine in 1961 and the first edition of The Yage Letters in 1963. “Roosevelt,” therefore, needs to be contextualized in relation to the history of censorship which, in Chapter 5 of Burroughs in Context, “The Obscene Queer,” Loren Glass addresses in his analysis of the legal case against Naked Lunch (1959). The publication in the US of Burroughs’ most famous novel was, in fact, delayed partly because of what happened when Floating Bear published “Roosevelt.” The other significant story of “Roosevelt” in the 1960s is its appearance in small presses and little magazines. In the oeuvres of most other writers, such publications would be dismissed as ephemeral and marginal – but again, not so in Burroughs’ case. On the contrary, the hundreds of short texts he disseminated across the literary field from the late 1950s onwards constitute a major part of the total work. For decades, these short pieces remained the dark matter of Burroughs’ textual universe, remembered by only a handful of collectors, archivists, and scholars.³

In the 1970s, “Roosevelt” found its place in more explicitly political contexts – and in each, the routine was described as a prophetic text. Burroughs himself framed “Roosevelt” as such in the rock music magazine Crawdaddy in 1977, where he claimed it was “in a sense, prophetic of Watergate” (reprinted in Reference BurroughsRoosevelt after Inauguration and Other Atrocities, 10). Again, at the Nova Convention held in his honor in New York a year later, where he performed “Roosevelt” as his keynote address, Burroughs claimed that it “appears, in retrospect, as designed to devalue the whole image of the Presidency.”⁴ This history tells us something about our temptation to find “Roosevelt” not just broadly relevant to our current cultural and political reality – for example, in how it depicts the executive’s takeover of the Supreme Court – but somehow precisely and uncannily predictive. Readers today can’t help but be struck by the astonishing coincidence of specific details, such as how Burroughs’ fictional president uses a version of the catchphrase that Donald Trump made famous on The Apprentice: “You’re fired you old fuck” (YL, 42). The sense of prophecy when reading “Roosevelt” – a context explored here by Farid Ghadami’s chapter, “The Seer and the Satirist” – is illusory, of course. Rather, what we experience is a form of paranoid reading – a context discussed by Chris Fleming in “The Conspiracy Theorist” in relation to Burroughs’ faith in the “Magical Universe.” Even if we rationalize such coincidences as meaningless, their seductive potency and unsettling impact remains, and Burroughs actively cultivated the reader’s uncanny sense that a past text can find future contexts. In the case of “Roosevelt,” we might say that the “coincidence is not literally prophetic, but rather prophetically literal, a profoundly affective experience of intersection” (Reference Harris, Schneiderman and WalshHarris, “Cutting Up Politics,” 195). Burroughs sought to weaponize coincidence in service of raising awareness because, as he put it in “Precise Intersection Points” (1965), “such seeming coincidence was no doubt frequent enough if people would just keep their eyes and ears open” (3M, 136). Opening eyes and ears is one aim of Burroughs in Context, whose chapters, loosely organized into five parts, generate multiple points of intersection with one another and, we hope, beyond the page.

Part I: Cultural Histories and Movements

Part I focuses on the cultural histories and artistic movements to which Burroughs contributed over his lifetime. The enduring image of Burroughs, however, is not as a member of movements but as a loner. This was how he mythologized himself in the mid 1950s, as a kind of alien belonging nowhere, “the last of an archaic line, or the first here from another space-time way – in any case a man without context, of no place and no time” (I, 50). Three decades later, in The Cat Inside (1986), he was still thinking of himself in almost identical terms: “I am the cat who walks alone. And to me all supermarkets are alike” (90). This solitary sense of estrangement may well have been how Burroughs felt, but one of the dangers of trusting his self-mythologizing or cherry-picking his quotations is that these identifications belie Burroughs’ habit of self-contradiction. “The context of the writer in his times is critical,” he told an interviewer in 1981, for example (Reference LotringerLotringer, Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960–1997, 626). It doesn’t always do Burroughs justice to take him on his own terms, or at his own word.

One way or another, all the chapters in this part confront Burroughs’ deeply ambivalent relationship to place and history, starting with Steven Belletto’s exploration of the Beat scene that emerged in 1940s New York. As Belletto observes in “The Inscrutable Beat,” the Beat label has had “the most staying power” because, like most other efforts to categorize Burroughs, it offers some comfort, a way to manage the threatening inscrutability of both the man and his work. Yet the Beat label has long overstayed its welcome, not least because Burroughs’ work soon left behind both the cultural points of reference and literary forms that helped define the term.

Long before the Beat movement became a mass media cultural phenomenon in the mid 1950s, Burroughs had already left the United States to begin a quarter of a century as a writer-in-exile in Latin America, North Africa, and Europe, the expatriate scenes that Eva Kowalska surveys in “The Exile.” Kowalska’s chapter builds on recent scholarship to help answer the question posed more than twenty years ago by Greg Mullins: “why is Burroughs rarely discussed as an expatriate author?” (Reference MullinsColonial Affairs, 50). One reason is that, as Fazzino argued in Reference FazzinoWorld Beats (2016), critics wrongly assumed that “Burroughs was either uninterested or simply unaware of the contemporary sociopolitical situation of the places in which he travelled and lived” (148). Kowalska observes that his writing rarely maps realistically onto the geography of his travels, but she argues that exile still deeply informed his work. His psychological reasons for expatriation – “I travelled because I was a man trying to escape from himself” (Reference LotringerLotringer, 511) – were also political ones for a heroin addict and homosexual in Cold War America. In Mexico, Latin America, and North Africa, Burroughs’ identity as an American became inescapable and unbearable, leading him to see writing as a means to confront and combat his cultural conditioning.

David Banash’s analysis in “The Avant-Gardist” of Burroughs’ relationship to the interwar and postwar avant-gardes picks up where Belletto’s study of the Beat Generation leaves off – particularly in light of how Burroughs himself defined the Beats: “It’s not a literary movement in the French sense at all” (Reference LotringerLotringer, 626). That “French sense” – and the literal setting of Paris – formed the backdrop for Burroughs’ Cut-Up project of the 1960s, which, Banash argues, drew more heavily from the Surrealists of the 1930s than from the nihilistic Dadaists of the 1920s. Developing his own forms of détournement with a pair of scissors, Burroughs’ methods and ideas coincide chronologically with those of Guy Debord and the Situationist International. Banash confronts two paradoxes. Firstly, that Burroughs was too much of the individualist to join or create a lasting collective movement. And secondly, that many of the techniques developed by Burroughs (and Debord) for progressive purposes have been appropriated to serve the “proto-fascist post-truth politics” of the twenty-first century.

This second paradox informs Guy Stevenson’s chapter, “The Counterculture Icon,” which vividly charts the reach of Burroughs’ avant-gardism into the British and American punk scenes of the 1970s. For Stevenson, Burroughs’ punk appeal stands in stark contrast to the fading impact of the other major Beats, whose romanticized humanism (Kerouac) and idealism (Ginsberg) had, by then, been fully commercialized and co-opted. In contrast, Burroughs’ radically caustic and viciously contemptuous attitude helped punk rockers flush hypocrisy into the open. The Sex Pistols’ denunciation of 1970s Britain’s “fascist regime” echoed Burroughs’ own savage attacks on the Royal family – carried out with a pair of scissors as early as Minutes to Go in 1960. Stevenson builds on Casey Reference RaeRae’s William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ’n’ Roll (2020) to trace Burroughs’ intersections with the rock and punk music scenes, while focusing attention on the enduring influence of work that can still cause acute discomfort and offense, thereby resisting easy recuperation.

Burroughs has always been an offensive writer in both senses of the word – causing offense and going on the offense – such that all his work is a call to arms based on the principle that, as he put it in 1960, “You cannot win allies without making enemies” (qtd. in BI, lvii). As explored by Loren Glass’s chapter, “The Obscene Queer,” during Burroughs’ first decades as a published writer his reception was dominated by legal action, especially the 1966 Boston obscenity trial of Naked Lunch. However, literary censorship is not a purely historical issue, and Glass updates the case against Naked Lunch in reference to contemporary book banning campaigns and culture wars in the United States. In a surprising twist, Glass brings these issues into the college classroom to make his own case against Burroughs’ Naked Lunch being taught in introductory courses, considering seriously feedback from students who took offense at the book’s grotesque representations of sexual acts and identity. The conclusion is that Burroughs is better served – is in a sense saved – by being excluded from an environment that would otherwise domesticate a text that exults in trashing taboos and challenging norms.

Burroughs’ defiance of literary norms lies at the core of the dilemma explored in Sean Bolton’s chapter, “The Non-canonical Writer,” which concludes Part I by examining his relationship to the literary canon. Surveying the numerous scholarly efforts to pigeonhole Burroughs – Modernist? Postmodernist? Amodernist? – Bolton argues that the failure to pin down his work is part of its appeal. Burroughs has remained on the margins of official canons, and although he made it into the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction, it’s notable that Kerouac has four volumes in the prestigious editions of the Library of America, and Burroughs has none. One option Bolton briefly considers is that his work belongs better in canons of prose poetry, which makes good sense given its deep affinities with the image-dense, collage aesthetic of poets such as Arthur Rimbaud, T. S. Eliot and Saint-John Perse (a genealogy also traced by Stompor in Chapter 19, “The Space-Time Traveler”).⁵

Part II: Identities

Part II explores the range of identities Burroughs adopted over his life and the variety of roles he played. This part resonates with all the ghost chapters that could have been written: Burroughs the Philosopher, for example, or Burroughs the Occultist, Burroughs the Comedian, and so on.⁶ Burroughs was a man of many hats, which makes this volume’s use of the definite article for every chapter title an in-joke – one that plays on his own fluid understanding of identity and reality. Burroughs repeatedly warned about the falsifications of everyday language, especially the definite article and the way its use makes us think reductively about the complexity of existence. His 1960 text The Exterminator is, therefore, what its title says it is: a machine for exterminating the definite article, “the,” and, by extension, the archaic pronoun “thee” (which appears some eighty times in the text). The blistering opening of Nova Express (1964) attacks the ruling elites who run the earth like a colony but likewise focuses on our colonization by a language that fixes our reality: “‘The’ word of Alien Enemy imprisons ‘thee’ in Time” (NE, 2). Burroughs’ distinction between the fixed essentializing of the definite article and a more fluid, mobile understanding of identity features throughout Part II.

In the opening chapter, “The Monster,” Oliver Harris focuses on Burroughs’ identity as the Ugly American: the privileged WASP identity into which Burroughs was born, and which he loathed. Burroughs’ desire to confront and exorcize this identity motivates the ugly racism, homophobia, and misogyny in his work – but it also exposed him to accusations of being himself a monster. The strategic ambiguities of Burroughs’ work have often been ignored in the rush to pass moral judgment about his actions, sometimes with casual cruelty: “Burroughs said women were an evolutionary error. (Well, it’s one excuse for killing your wife)” runs the title of a review in a respected newspaper.⁷ As Harris argues, such judgments may reveal more about the people making them than about the facts. Burroughs was many things, but a monster was not one of them. The real monster is Western culture itself – its darkest depths magnified and unsparingly reflected back to us in Burroughs’ work.

Barry Miles, author of not one but two biographies of Burroughs, also considers the problematic relationship between his vivid image and multiple identities in his chapter, “El Hombre Invisible.” Miles focuses on the paradox that, on the one hand, Burroughs became famous enough to be instantly recognizable – an iconic media figure typically snapped in his trademark fedora – while on the other hand, his conservative sartorial choices operated as the subversive sign system of a radical performance artist. Was his appearance that of a banker or a gangster, an accountant or an assassin? Like David Bowie – with whom he posed for a famous series of “Wild Boy” photographs in the mid 1970s – Burroughs cultivated an image that was fluid and indeterminate, crossing boundaries, flaunting itself and yet also hiding the man within.

One hat that Burroughs donned in the early 1950s was the pith helmet of the anthropological explorer, the identity studied by David Calonne in “The Anthropologist.” As well as documenting the academic training that Burroughs had in the fields of anthropology and ethnography, Calonne connects Burroughs to other anthropologists similarly interested in making a hybrid of scientific study and literary experiment – notably Carlos Castaneda, whose books caught the imagination of many in the late 1960s and 1970s, including Burroughs, and Michael Taussig, a preeminent critical anthropologist whose work is openly Burroughsian. If one upshot of this chapter is to bring to attention anthropological references that might have passed unnoticed – such as to Margaret Mead and Franz Boas, both named in Naked Lunch – another is to recast much of Burroughs’ work as anthropological in attitude and approach, if not in disciplinary form.

Another of Burroughs’ most familiar identities is that of the prophet, although, as Farid Ghadami reveals in “The Seer and the Satirist,” he had a curious relationship to it. For Burroughs played the prophet to subvert the role, ridiculing the figure to short-circuit his own temptation to exercise the seductive power of authority, and our temptation to surrender to religious leaders. As a result, Burroughs rubbed against the grain of the cultural history and literary contexts that Ghadami documents, from the Puritan traditions of American prophecy to that of British Romantic poets like William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Instead, Ghadami concludes that Burroughs pioneered a uniquely collaborative form of the prophetic, according to which readers retrospectively co-create prophetic messages in their reading of Burroughs’ texts.

Ian MacFadyen’s chapter, “The Macho Queer,” returns to some of the most troubling material in the Burroughs oeuvre: his representation of sexuality, a central subject so contentious that many critics have avoided it. Like Harris, MacFadyen addresses Burroughs’ reputation for misogyny, and, like Miles, he connects it to a machismo public image that served as a cover story, hiding his true desires and traumatic experiences of homophobia. But MacFadyen also conducts close textual readings to trace a trajectory across the oeuvre, from the abjection of Burroughs’ 1950s routines to the exuberant eroticism and all-male utopias of The Wild Boys (1971) and Port of Saints (1973). Burroughs’ misogyny isn’t explained away here, but his attitudes toward women are given a historical context that helps understand where those sentiments and ideas came from and how Burroughs dealt with them.

Burroughs recognized his reputation and tried to nuance it; for example, by writing back to the New York Review of Books in 1984 to “clarify” Luc Sante’s accusations of misogyny, which “make no allowance for my statements on the subject since 1970.”⁸ Sante’s article risked being reductive about Burroughs’ politics, claiming “it would be inadequate to pronounce it ‘fascist,’ although the temptation to do so is strong.” This is the subject of Florian Zappe’s chapter, “The Libertarian,” which rightly registers alarm at recent efforts by the Alt Right to co-opt Burroughs. Zappe explores a “libertarian-reactionary streak” that runs through Burroughs’ life and work, but, like most of the chapters in this part, Zappe objects to simplistic readings or willful misreadings that confuse Burroughs’ politics with a contemporary neofascist, white nationalist Christianity that embodies the very values his work most explicitly opposes. Liberal anxieties about Burroughs’ sexuality and politics are understandable, but, as Zappe demonstrates, it would be a tragic error to let his enemies claim Burroughs as one of their own.

Examining texts from Queer to The Wild Boys, Alan Carmody’s chapter, “The De-colonizer,” covers some of the same textual ground as Harris and MacFadyen but shifts the focus to charting Burroughs’ engagement with American neocolonialism. His chapter argues against taking Burroughs’ work as a political blueprint, demonstrating how it reappropriates and queers colonial discourse to imagine sites of anarchic potential. Like Zappe’s chapter, Carmody’s shows how necessary it is to go beyond identifying superficial appearances in Burroughs’ texts to recognize the subversive and provocative strategies at work.

The same can be said of Chris Fleming’s examination of paranoia and conspiracy thinking in “The Conspiracy Theorist.” On the surface, Burroughs’ more conspiratorial views conform to the “paranoid style” of the political right, which have, in the twenty-first century, moved from the lunatic outer fringes to occupy the center of American politics. But, as Fleming argues, while Burroughs’ use of pulp detective genre plots and his belief in a magical universe inclined him to suspect all appearances, authorities, and orthodoxies, the result is “artistically generative.” Fleming concludes that Burroughs defies efforts to judge or label him, to reduce the contradictions and ambiguities in his work in search of reassuringly clear interpretations. On the contrary, as Andrew O’Hagan once put it, “to read Burroughs is briefly to make contact with a Burroughsian version of oneself. You stagger back, newly paranoid” (Reference O’Hagan“The Dark Dreams of William Burroughs”).

This part concludes from a rather different perspective, with Allen Hibbard’s overview of Burroughs’ creative collaborations in “The Collaborator.” The fitting irony here is that Burroughs’ identity as a collaborator challenges traditional notions of authorship, since creative collaboration moves beyond the solitary self typically associated with the figure of the major author or artistic genius. Hibbard’s wide-ranging survey reveals how collaboration was the standard operating procedure for Burroughs across his entire career, from acting out “Twilight’s Last Gleamings” with Kells Elvins in 1938 to making movies with Antony Balch in the 1960s, or recording musical mixes in the 1990s. Such partnerships were creative, but Hibbard also observes the difficulties and dangers that plagued the “third mind” project with his closest artistic collaborator, Brion Gysin.

Part III: Space-Time Travel

To take Burroughs at his word requires readers and audiences to follow him into uncomfortable and sometimes absurd territory: His pronouncements that spoken language evolves from the written word are clearly not supported by the anthropological record; his statements that the word is an actual virus and separate from the human organism raise all sorts of unanswered questions; his offensive assertion that “women are a biological mistake” is difficult to attribute to anything beyond puerile male fantasy. Yet, it’s also a mistake to consider Burroughs’ most transgressive ideas as purely metaphorical. The chapters in Part III seek to examine Burroughs’ work through the lens of “space-time travel,” considering how he systematically employed modes of technology and psychology to generate alternative pasts and futures. When Burroughs chased Rimbaud’s “derangement of the senses,” he sought to make a method out of the ideas that would allow him to transcend the limitations of his historical era.

Burroughs, of course, was far from alone in these interests. Many twentieth-century writers, artists, and theorists were deeply engaged in rethinking time and space. Samuel Beckett explored meaningless time in Waiting for Godot (1953); J. G. Ballard fractured time in surreal narratives like The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), Crash (1973), and Concrete Island (1974). Octavia Butler (Kindred [1979]) and Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed [1974]) used science fiction to challenge conventional temporality and explore time as a political force. Visual artists like Maya Deren and Alexandr Hackenschmied (Meshes of the Afternoon [1943]) and Yayoi Kusama (Infinity Mirror Room series, 1965–) created works that disrupt spatial and temporal perception. In film, Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) told a time-travel story through fragmented stills, much like Burroughs’ literary collages. Theorists like Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media [1964]), who saw media as an extension of human perception, and, much earlier, Henri Bergson (Matter and Memory [1896]), who conceptualized time as fluid and psychological, provide further context for Burroughs’ engagement with nonlinear time. These figures sought to disrupt and reimagine time, perception, and human experience.

Yet what distinguishes Burroughs from many other twentieth-century artists – many of whom engaged in strategies that we recognize as aleatory and ludic – is the specific way he approached his work from both formal and functional levels. While his reputation as a literary innovator springs from the “difficulty” of Naked Lunch, and, following that succès de scandale, the cut-up novels of the 1960s, Burroughs’ treatment of the word as both figurative and physical allows for his exploration of time as a mutable substance. Burroughs constructed his authorship as a form of space-time travel: Through his interest and experiments with such psychedelic drugs as yagé (decades before its rebranding as celebrity-adjacent wellness drug), alternative philosophies and movements (Scientology, Oswald Spengler, Wilhem Reich, etc.), and his abiding interest in two different strands of the pulp tradition (boyhood adventure stories and science fiction), Burroughs’ works tried to disrupt traditional notions of time, reality, and human agency.

Benoît Delaune’s “The Recycler” opens this part to show how Burroughs used repetition and variation to collapse linear time and produce recursive effects across his novels. Delaune argues that Burroughs’ reuse of fragmented language generates a textual déjà vu that unsettles chronology and meaning. Far from random, these repetitions form a materialist poetics that resists conventional intertextuality. Like a form of literary musique concrète, Burroughs’ method bends time through echo and duplication, revealing his texts as machines for nonlinear experience.

Marcus Boon’s “The Visionary” traces Burroughs’ engagement with the hallucinogenic plant brew yagé, an experience he documented in The Yage Letters and Queer, and which recently received big-screen treatment in the film version of Queer (2024). Boon notes how Burroughs’ interest in the drug stems in part from its rumored ability to grant telepathic powers, and how the dream of such telepathy is tied to twentieth-century politics. Boon notably situates Burroughs’ yagé experiences within the broader psychedelic movement in the 1960s and 1970s, and he argues that Burroughs’ famous vision of the Composite City in The Yage Letters relates to his experiments with time and perception. As Boon concludes, Burroughs’ fascination with yagé was not merely about its visionary effects but about its ability to transcend conventional time and space. Through yagé, Burroughs experiences time as both fluid and unstable – and it’s in this instability that he speculates on alternatives.

Daria Baryshnikova’s “The Scissor Man” takes a new look at Burroughs’ cut-up practices, noting their ability to fracture temporality. She argues that Burroughs views language as a control device that shapes human thought in deterministic ways. Drawing on enactivist theories of mind and cognitive narratology, this chapter argues that Burroughs’ cut-ups enact mental processes, rather than merely represent them. A close reading of Burroughs’ BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS (composed in 1960, published in 2020) demonstrates how cut-ups transform reading into an embodied, participatory process, offering new insight into Burroughs’ engagement with perception, subjectivity, and process-based poetics.

Tomasz Stompor’s “The Space-Time Traveler” shows Burroughs obsessed with time as a fluid and nonlinear force whose unstable nature could be expressed through cut-ups. Influenced by the notions of cyclical time in Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918–1922), Burroughs used cut-ups as both literary technique and temporal resistance. Echoing Boon, Stompor argues that Burroughs’ encounters with yagé in the 1950s provided a proto-cut-up experience, framing reality as a montage of past, present, and future coexisting in a single moment. Tellingly, this composite vision becomes the Composite City, a space where history and potential futures merge.

This theme of composite spaces continues in Burroughs’ science fiction-inflected work, as Clémentine Hougue explores in “The Science Fiction World Builder.” Connecting Burroughs to speculative writers such as Samuel R. Delany, Kathy Acker, and William Gibson, Hougue argues that Burroughs’ cut-up novels deploy genre tropes – aliens, time travel, dystopian futures – to disrupt traditional narrative structures, and, therefore, conventional temporality. Because a science fiction text usually tells us more about conditions at the time of its writing than about the actual future (that is, “the future that never was”), and because backward-looking fiction equally reflects the time from which it arose, this part also tackles Burroughs’ interests in nostalgia and boyhood.

Thom Robinson’s “The (Revised) Boy Scout” explores Burroughs’ relationship to time through nostalgia, with a particular focus on the influence of the English writer Denton Welch. While Burroughs’ work often rejected nostalgia as a type of weaponized discourse – a type of reactionary narrative deployed for the purposes of control – his work is paradoxically full of images of childhood and youth. Tellingly, both The Wild Boys and Cities of the Red Night (1981) construct alternative societies where boys live outside time; the eternally young and sexually active adolescents seem immune to aging, having escaped into a permanent state of dreamy youthfulness.

Together, the chapters in Part III show Burroughs as an artist deeply engaged with space-time as concept and construct. Whether through pharmaceutical experiments with yagé, science fiction speculations, nostalgic boyhood fantasies, or the material manipulation of the word as a material substance, Burroughs’ work is an invitation to rethink time, to transform it from an inescapable force into a field of possibilities that can be rewritten and amended.

Part IV: Modes of Creativity

Over his long artistic career, Burroughs operated across multiple modes of expression and various artistic disciplines. While primarily known for his fiction writing, Burroughs’ works exhibit a striking diversity in style, form, and purpose, even within traditional prose genres. The chapters in Part IV explores Burroughs’ artistic experiments, ranging from “cut-up” techniques that fragmented linear narratives to multimedia methods involving grids, three-column texts, tape-recorder sound manipulations, shotgun paintings, and collaborations in film and performance. Continuously testing the boundaries of medium and method, his work in sound and film reflects many of the same material and philosophical impulses that drive his literary collages, earning Burroughs’ place in the history of multimodal art.

In its broadest sense, “multimodal” refers to the integration of various modes of communication – such as text, sound, image, and gesture – into a single expressive system. Instead of relying on a single artistic channel, multimodal composition layers different sign systems to generate meaning in dynamic, impactful, and often nonlinear ways. Burroughs, as a multimodal agent also suggests oscillating loyalties, and, as with all of Burroughs’ works, meaning changes depending on context. Accordingly, the chapters in this part examine how the interplay of control mechanisms and methods of resistance manifests through Burroughs’ diverse artistic disciplines, collaborations with other artists, and performances of multiple personas. As “El Hombre Invisible,” the inveterate outsider and master of disguise, Burroughs becomes, when viewed through a multimodal lens, both an agent of disruption and an aesthetic strategist.

In “The DJ,” Benjamin J. Heal explores Burroughs’ use of tape recorders and cut-up techniques to disrupt dominant perspectives and narratives, emphasizing not only these devices’ aesthetic function but also their political and psychological implications. This chapter situates Burroughs’ audio experiments within a history of sound manipulation, linking his techniques to Dadaist sound poetry and later developments in remix culture and DJ sampling. Heal suggests that recorded speech in Burroughs is not merely fractured and looped but weaponized. Collectively, these chapters underscore Burroughs’ view of communication channels as a battleground where control is both exerted and resisted.

Alex Wermer-Colan’s “The Screenwriter” explores Burroughs’ contributions to the art of cinema, especially as a screenwriter, highlighting both his neglected, and unrealized, screenplays from the late 1960s and 1970s, and his theoretical contributions to screenwriting in his lectures on the subject at the City College of New York and Naropa University in the mid 1970s. Through this overview of Burroughs’ multi-decade-long experiments in screenwriting, including in Towers Open Fire (1963), The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (1970), The Wild Boys movie (1972), and Blade Runner: A Movie (1979), this chapter argues that Burroughs remains overlooked for his valuable vision of an alternate cinema at a crucial time in American culture and history.

Burroughs’ interest in cinema, performance, and identity is further developed in Katharine Streip’s “The Performer,” which examines Burroughs’ work as a performing actor – both as a successful reader of his own works and in his film appearances (Chappaqua [1966] and Drugstore Cowboy [1989]). This chapter also takes into consideration Burroughs’ role as a librettist and collaborator on Robert Wilson’s opera The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets (1990). Streip locates Burroughs within a lineage of performance history, drawing connections between his persona and the destabilized identities of his characters.

Returning to the more well-trodden ground of literature, Fiona Paton’s “The Horror Writer” examines Burroughs’ underappreciated breakthroughs in the gothic/horror genre. Like his pastiches of the hardboiled detective tradition – which also require further research, beyond the scope of this volume – Burroughs’ use of horror is intimately connected to other central issues. Here, Paton traces his explorations of the grotesque, unstable body in Naked Lunch, to connect Burroughs’ imagery of physical dissolution to concerns about technological control and the erosion of human identity. In her exploration of Burroughs’ unique contribution to the horror genre, Paton provides a counterpoint to readings of Burroughs as a strong “presence,” by emphasizing how both bodies and texts remain unstably mutable, haunting, and multimodal.

Jimmy Fazzino’s “The Guerrilla Warrior” reframes Burroughs’ work through a political lens, viewing it not merely as fiction but as part of the long tradition in the avant-garde of writing manifestos. Rather than treating Burroughs’ most radical statements as rhetorical excess or fictional provocation, Fazzino examines them in continuity with avant-garde polemics and pamphleteering, a very specific genre in the history studied by Banash in “The Avant-Gardist.” By placing Burroughs within a lineage that includes the Futurists, Dadaists, and Lettrists, Fazzino argues that Burroughs was not just a critic of control from the comfortable remove of a fiction writer but also an actual tactician engaged in a media war.

Yuri Zupancic’s “The Visual Artist” looks beyond the view of Burroughs as a singular artist working within a defined tradition, highlighting how his visual works, from photo collages to shotgun paintings, were produced less for the public than for himself and his friends, and resist conventional classification within art historical fields. Even though Burroughs, by most measures, was a successful visual artist who created in diverse media, including paintings, collages, photography, and sculptures, this aspect of his multimodality remains secondary to his primary identification as a novelist. Zupancic argues that while Burroughs met and collaborated with many visual artists, and displayed his work at international art galleries, his artistic practice, even today, stands outside of the mainstream of twentieth-century art.

While other chapters in this collection, notably Allen Hibbard’s “The Collaborator,” focus on Burroughs as a collaborator, Jeffrey L. Meikle’s “The Muse” explores the influence of Burroughs on a unique musical artist, Laurie Anderson, emphasizing not only their shared interest in language and technology but also how the 1978 Nova Convention helped launch Anderson’s distinguished career. One can envision similar chapters about Burroughs and Patti Smith or Kurt Cobain, and many other musical artists, but Meikle’s choice of Anderson is significant: Few artists, if any, have produced musical and artistic work over as long a time period with the influence of Burroughs clearly brought to the fore, and her use of electronically distorted speech and fractured storytelling owes much to Burroughs’ cut-up work and his role as a performer.

The chapters in this part redefine our understanding of Burroughs’ artistic practice, not as a series of separate experiments but as an interconnected system of creative intervention. Multimodality, in Burroughs’ hands, is never a single means of expression – it is a (multi)mode of resistance, a method for fracturing meaning, and a way of potentially reprogramming perception.

Part V: Science, Medicine, and Technology

Zooming out from the varied settings, identities, and methodologies central to Burroughs’ work, the chapters in Part V consider his work and its relevance to broader themes of science and technology, especially as they overlap with and transcend the human. Fields of medicine, virology, and biopower come to the fore, as do Burroughs’ prophetic visions of the future in his science fiction and theoretical writings.

Timothy S. Murphy’s “The Burroughs Singularity” argues that Burroughs’ work constitutes a singularity in literary history – an event that collapses traditional categorization. Murphy explores Burroughs’ oeuvre as a “singularity” in three overlapping senses: aesthetic uniqueness, philosophical resistance to generalization, and cosmological metaphor. Murphy’s interpretation of Burroughs through astronomical bodies (black holes, supernovae), especially in the cut-up novels’ conflict between the Nova Mob and Nova Police, highlights how Burroughs’ work absorbs and distorts meaning, creating gravitational fields that can shift our understanding of the universe within which we live.

If Murphy’s chapter views Burroughs from outer space, Phil Baker’s chapter, “The Master Addict” looks at the most embodied, biological elements of Burroughs’ writing, considering how his engagement with drugs as a technology defies stereotypical thinking about addiction and recovery. Baker’s accounting of Burroughs’ “career with drugs” outlines his opiate use, his excursion into hallucinogens (notably yagé) as psychic exploration, and his chosen literary precursors, notably Thomas De Quincey. Baker frames Burroughs’ depiction of drugs, along with nostalgia and dreaming, as valuable tools for exploring subjective space, and suggests that a common denominator throughout Burroughs’ changing stances on drugs is freedom, not only from addiction but from the body, and from outside control.

Following Baker’s analysis of addiction, Polina Mackay and James Mackay’s chapter, “The Epidemiologist,” traces Burroughs’ lifelong obsession with disease – particularly cancer and viruses – as a central metaphor in his critique of power, control, and modernity. Burroughs’ engagement with medicine, from his early syphilis diagnosis to his interest in Wilhelm Reich’s unorthodox theories, shaped his representation of illness as both literal and ideological contagion. From Junky to Naked Lunch, the cut-up texts, and Blade Runner, Burroughs portrays medical institutions and bureaucracies not as healing forces but as agents of repression, manipulation, and decay. McKay’s chapter shows how Burroughs’ writing fuses Reichian thought, alternative medicine, and paranoid systems theory into a distinctive epidemiology of language, addiction, and social control.

The metaphor of disease was so crucial to Burroughs’ thinking that additional chapters explore the significance of viral contagions, both of the body and mind. Drawing on works such as Cities of the Red Night, Naked Lunch, and Ghost of Chance (1991), Lejla Kucukalic’s chapter, “The Parasite” explores Burroughs’ reimagining of parasitical entities – not solely as biological threats but as units of language, ideology, and cultural transmission. Situating Burroughs’ writing alongside scientific thought and postmodern theory, the chapter conducts a close reading of Burroughs’ lectures on the virus at the City College of New York in the Spring of 1974 (published in Burroughs Unbound: William S. Burroughs and the Performance of Writing, ed. S. E. Gontarkski [London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021]), exploring the virus as a liminal force capable of mutating identity, dissolving fixed moral binaries, and challenging notions of agency and autonomy. As Kucukalic argues, Burroughs seeks not just to expose viral control but to become a viral force himself, rewriting perception through a radical reprogramming of language and consciousness.

Further developing Burroughs’ theories of the virus, James Akira Ward’s chapter, “The Virologist,” likens Burroughs’ theory of language to linguist Noam Chomsky’s contemporaneous theory of language as preprogrammed. Both thinkers, Ward argues, contest the persistent, commonly held view that language is essentially communication – a vehicle or mechanism bearing a necessary relation to something outside of itself. For Chomsky, language is a tool of thought; for Burroughs, a tool of thought control. Ward’s chapter draws on this comparison between Burroughs and a famous linguist to consider the millennial fortunes of the contemporary Burroughsian paradigm emerging in social media ecosystems regulated by artificial intelligence (AI), and the ongoing role of “virality” so common to discourse on social influence today.

Burroughs’ thinking on language as a virus under constant evolution within the changing nature of human technology leads to Burroughs’ cyberpunk visions of autonomous robots and anticipates the rise of AI today. To consider Burroughs’ relevance to debates on AI, Davis Schneiderman’s chapter, “The Electronic Revolutionary,” revisits what he calls Burroughs’ “Playback Trilogy” – The Job (1970), The Electronic Revolution (1971), and The Revised Boy Scout Manual (written in 1970, published in 2018) – as a critical lens for understanding the contemporary challenges posed by generative AI, misinformation, and deepfake media. Arguing that Burroughs’ theories of language, media manipulation, and technological control anticipate core dynamics of AI’s contemporary influence on culture and perception, Schneiderman explores how Burroughs’ experiments with tape recorders and playback foreshadow interactive algorithmic systems that operate with unintended, emergent consequences. From deepfakes of politicians to AI chatbots inciting violence, Schneiderman demonstrates that Burroughs’ methods – cut-up, disruption, playback – remain urgently instructive for resisting the logic of control in the digital age.

After covering Burroughs’ relevance to the cosmos, the body, and the virus, this part concludes with Steen Ledet Christiansen’s chapter, “The Environmentalist,” which repositions Burroughs as a radical environmental thinker whose apocalyptic visions and experimental prose provide an oblique but vital contribution to ecocriticism. Christiansen argues that Burroughs’ work – particularly Naked Lunch, The Exterminator, and the Cut-Up/Nova Trilogy – challenges the limits of environmental representation through stylistic rupture, linguistic sabotage, and the dissolution of the human subject. Far from a conventional ecological writer, Burroughs destabilizes anthropocentric frameworks and anticipates posthumanist theories by framing language itself as a viral, controlling force. Christiansen concludes that Burroughs’ fractured narratives expose the environmental imagination to new modes of seeing and being, making him an essential figure in rethinking literature’s role in the Anthropocene, and our understanding of our planet’s rapidly changing climate.

If the Anthropocene was a concept that hardly existed in Burroughs’ time, this volume speaks precisely to the value of his work for illuminating how we can understand not just his time, but our own. The twenty-first century may have the language to describe the problems that face humanity, but that language often obscures our understanding and prevents action, as Burroughs was so acutely aware. The editors of this volume hope that by turning back to take a closer look at the context of Burroughs’ insights into the past, present, and future, these chapters will shed new light on the issues facing us today. In multiple ways, Burroughs’ work serves as an urgent, prescient warning and roadmap for resistance. Perhaps we should not be surprised, then, to find Burroughs already imagining posthuman possibilities back in 1953, in the punchline to “Roosevelt after Inauguration,” where the president, filled with “hate for the human species as it is,” seems to speak for Burroughs himself as a misanthrope drawn to radical methods in hope of bringing about real change: “‘I’ll make the cocksuckers glad to mutate,’ he would say, looking off into space as if seeking new frontiers of depravity” (YL, 45).