William Burroughs
(born 1914, St. Louis, Missouri, USA; died 1997, Lawrence, Kansas, USA)

American experimental novelist who emerged from New York's beat scene with the publication of Naked Lunch in 1959. Burroughs quickly became mythologized as a literary outlaw and junkie queer hero who went on to influence successive counter-culture movements. Much of his fiction uses collage techniques -- the 'cut-up', the 'fold-in' -- to counteract the numbing effects of mass media.