![]() It was in New York that he met the other leading lights of the “Beat Generation” as they became known – Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. ![]() This meant that for the next 25 years, he didn’t have to work and was free to write. Luckily for Burroughs, after he graduated, his parents gave him a monthly allowance of $200. Despite subsequently losing his virginity to a female prostitute in a brothel in St Louis, while at Harvard, he made regular trips to New York City, immersing himself in the gay subculture there. This did not go according to plan, however, as his journals indicate that he was sexually attracted to another boy during his time there. Initially, he attended the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, which was a boarding school for wealthy students where – as he put it – “the spindly sons of the rich could be transformed into manly specimens”. ![]() His early life seems to have been a sexually confusing time for Burroughs. ![]() However, he was also hailed by Norman Mailer as “the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius”.īorn to a wealthy family in Missouri, Burroughs went to Harvard University. ![]() After Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas DeQuincy, William Burroughs (who died on this day in 1997) is probably the third most famous drug addict in literary history. ![]()
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