Burroughs, William Seward

▪ 1998

      American writer (b. Feb. 5, 1914, St. Louis, Mo.—d. Aug. 2, 1997, Lawrence, Kan.), was the author of the notorious avant-garde novel Naked Lunch (1959). After graduating from Harvard University in 1936, Burroughs moved to New York City, where in the early 1940s he associated with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg (Ginsberg, Allen ) (q.v.), Neal Cassady, and others with whom he would be identified as a member of the Beat Generation. During this period Burroughs developed a heroin addiction that lasted into the 1960s. Despite his open homosexuality, he entered into a common-law marriage with Joan Vollmer in 1946; five years later, attempting a drunken stunt during a party in Mexico City, he shot and killed her. He fled Mexico and was never tried for the offense. Though ostensibly an accident, Burroughs was tormented by the idea that subconsciously he had desired her death; his remorse spurred him to devote himself to writing. His most famous novel, Naked Lunch, simulates nightmarish heroin-induced hallucinations through a variety of experimental techniques, including lack of narrative, stream of consciousness, and random ordering of story parts. The book was acclaimed (and also condemned) as a disturbing representation of existential alienation. Though Naked Lunch features explicit depictions of sex and violence, a legal attempt to ban it in the United States for obscenity failed, which cleared the way for more open treatment of such subject matter in literature. His next novels—The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964)—employed his "cut-up" technique, in which quotations from unrelated sources were cut and randomly inserted into his own text. Few of his subsequent writings attracted significant attention. In later life Burroughs became an all-purpose avant-garde icon, appearing with rock musicians and in television advertisements and movies.

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▪ American inventor

born January 28, 1855, Auburn, New York, U.S.

died September 15, 1898, Citronelle, Alabama

      American inventor of the first recording adding machine (calculator) and pioneer of its manufacture.

 After a brief education Burroughs supported himself from the age of 15. In 1881 he began working in his father's shop in St. Louis, Missouri, constructing models for castings and working on new inventions. At that time he decided to construct a machine for solving arithmetical problems and, with financial help from an acquaintance, Thomas B. Metcalfe, completed his first calculating machine (1885), which, however, proved to be commercially impractical. But, with Metcalfe and two other St. Louis businessmen, he organized the American Arithmometer Company in 1886; after much trial and error he patented a practical model in 1892. (See the photograph—>.) Although the machine was a commercial success, he died before receiving much money from it. A year before his death he received the John Scott Medal of the Franklin Institute as an award for his invention. In 1905 the Burroughs Adding Machine Company was organized in Michigan as successor to the American Arithmometer Company.

 

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