(Originally published on PleaseKillMe.com) For more than any other man, dead or alive, William S. Burroughs is the one responsible for introducing deviancy into the mainstream of American culture. As author of Junky, Naked Lunch, Nova Express, The Wild Boys, and Cities of the Red Night, to name a few, this is the man who is grandfather to the hippies and godfather to the punks, the guy who inspired Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady to push it to the limit, the homosexual and avowed misogynist who accidentally shot and killed his wife in a drunken game of William Tell, the writer who became a member of the American Academy of Art and Letters, the lifelong junkie who shot up in squalid hotel rooms around the world and in the process managed to snag a Commander de l’Ordre Arts et Lettres from the French government for writing about it.

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