William Seward Burroughs Papers, 1957-1976.

Summary Information

Abstract

Author, artist, spoken word performer, and founding member of the Beat Generation. The William S. Burroughs Papers contain manuscripts and galley proofs of some of Burroughs's novels, as well as biographical material on Burroughs.

At a Glance

Call No.:	MS#0174
Bib ID:	4078569 View CLIO record
Creator(s):	Burroughs, William S., 1914-1997.
Title:	William Seward Burroughs Papers, 1957-1976.
Physical description:	2.5 linear feet (6 document boxes and 1 oversize item).
Language(s):	In English
Access:	This collection is located on-site.  More information »

Arrangement

Arrangement

This collection is arranged in four series.

• Series I: Correspondence, 1953-1973
• Series II: Writings, 1958-1969
• Series III: Photographs and Realia
• Series IV: Victor Bockris Material Relating to Burroughs, 1965-1975
• Series V: Addition to the Papers, 2017

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Description

Scope and Content

The William S. Burroughs Papers contain manuscripts and galley proofs of some of Burroughs's novels, as well as experimental prose, including early examples of Burroughs's cut-up technique, and a small amount of correspondence. The collection also contains a series of biographical material on Burroughs collected by Victor Bockris.

Series I: Correspondence, 1953-1973

The Correspondence series contains a few select pieces of correspondence between Burroughs and his friends and collaborators. In this series are letters exchanged between Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg regarding their collaborative, epistolary book The Yage Letters. This series, though small, includes both letters later reprinted as part of the publication and correspondence related to the editing and process.

Series II: Writings, 1958-1969

The Writings series is the largest series in the collection and contains working drafts of 1961's Grove Press Edition of The Soft Machine, as well as annotated drafts and galley proofs of Burroughs's substantial 1965 revision of the novel published by Grove Press. There are also drafts and galleys of Nova Express ; a corrected, signed galley proof of The Naked Lunch; and full typescript drafts of The Yage Letters and Junkie. This series also contains a collection of prose experiments conducted by Burroughs utilizing the cut-up technique that he utilized in much of his longer fiction, as well as experiments in using a grid form to intersplice different texts together.

Series III: Photographs and Realia

The photographs in the collection are mostly snapshots of Burroughs and Herbert Huncke. Also included in this series is the Dreamachine, a device designed by Burroughs and Brion Gysin and constructed by Ian Sommerville, designed to help stimulate brain activity and bring about a hallucinatory state.

Series IV: Victor Bockris Files, 1965-1975

Victor Bockris, a friend and collaborator of Burroughs, Victor Bockris write several articles about Burroughs and edited both Burroughs's collection of essays, The Adding Machine and the interview-based book With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker. This series of material includes numerous drafts of and notes for With William Burroughs, as well as some of Burroughs's published writings collected by Bockris- including a small run of Crawdaddy Magazines featuring articles or columns by Burroughs and a copy of The Paris Review that includes both an interview with Burroughs and his essay "St. Louis Return."

Series V: Addition to the Papers, 2017

Accession 2017.2018.M020

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Using the Collection

RBML

Access Restrictions

This collection is located on-site.

Restrictions on Use

Single photocopies may be made for research purposes. Permission to publish material from the collection must be requested from the Curator of Manuscripts/University Archivist, Rare Book and Manuscript Library (RBML). The RBML approves permission to publish that which it physically owns; the responsibility to secure copyright permission rests with the patron.

Preferred Citation

Identification of specific item; Date (if known); William S. Burroughs Papers; Box and Folder; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.

Selected Related Material-- at Columbia

Allen Ginsberg Papers, 1944-1991 Columbia University, Rare Book & Manuscript Library

The Ginsberg Papers contain some correspondence, some additional experimental prose, and fractionary drafts of The Exterminator, Queer, and "The Hot Rod" as well as a full manuscript of The Naked Lunch (here referred to by the working title "Interzone.")

Jack Kerouac Correspondence, 1945-1965 Columbia University, Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Barry Miles Papers, 1958-1990 Columbia University, Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Ann Charters Photographs, 1966-1982 Columbia University, Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Naked Lunch: The First Fifty Years online exhibit, Columbia University, Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Selected Related Material-- Other Repositories

William S. Burroughs Papers New York Public Library, Berg Collection

William S. Burroughs Papers, WSB 97 Ohio State University, Rare Books and Manuscripts

William S. Burroughs Collection Hayden Library Special Collections, Arizona State University

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About the Finding Aid / Processing Information

Columbia University Libraries. Rare Book and Manuscript Library; machine readable finding aid created by Columbia University Libraries Digital Library Program Division

Processing Information

Cataloged 04/14/1989 Christina Hilton Fenn

Papers reprocessed 6/2009 Carrie Hintz

Finding aid wittten by Carrie Hintz, 2009.

Machine readable finding aid generated from MARC-AMC source via XSLT conversion July 25, 2009 Finding aid written in English.

2009-07-25 xml finding aid created by Carrie Hintz

2009-07-25 xml finding aid updated by Catherine C. Ricciardi

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Subject Headings

The subject headings listed below are found in this collection. Links below allow searches at Columbia University through the Archival Collections Portal and through CLIO, the catalog for Columbia University Libraries, as well as ArchiveGRID, a catalog that allows users to search the holdings of multiple research libraries and archives.

All links open new windows.

Genre/Form

Heading	CUL Archives: Portal	CUL Collections: CLIO	Nat'l / Int'l Archives: ArchiveGRID
Galley proofs.	Portal	CLIO	ArchiveGRID

Subjects

Heading	CUL Archives: Portal	CUL Collections: CLIO	Nat'l / Int'l Archives: ArchiveGRID
American literature.	Portal	CLIO	ArchiveGRID
Authors.	Portal	CLIO	ArchiveGRID
Bockris, Victor, 1949-	Portal	CLIO	ArchiveGRID

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History / Biographical Note

Biographical Note

William S. Burroughs was born in 1914 in St. Louis, Missouri. He attended private schools in St. Louis before a brief stint at the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico. He received a bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1936.

After graduating from Harvard, Burroughs spent a few years traveling through Europe, followed by a short stint in the US Army. After his discharge from the Army Burroughs moved to Chicago where he worked a string of odd jobs and spent time with his friend David Kammerer and Kammerer's obsession, University of Chicago student Lucien Carr. When Carr transferred from UC to Columbia University, both of the older men used this as an impetus to move to New York City as well.

It was through Carr that Burroughs met Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. The three, along with Carr, Kerouac's girlfriend Edie Parker and her roommate Joan Vollmer, forged close friendships centered around a shared love of literature, drugs, and a bohemian lifestyle. It was during this time that Burroughs was first introduced to narcotics through the well known Times Square hustler, and writer, Herbert Huncke and quickly became addicted to opiates. Jean Vollmer, Burroughs's lover, and later common-law wife, also suffered from an addiction that eventually resulted in her hospitalization for acute amphetamine psychosis. The two had a son, William S. Burroughs Jr., before Burroughs accidentally, but fatally, shot Vollmer in Mexico City.

Burroughs began working on the manuscript that would eventually become Junky in Mexico City before Vollmer's death. Though he had briefly worked on the short story "And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks" with Jack Kerouac, he did not have literary aspirations. Even while working on Junkie he assumed that the autobiographical novel would be an anomaly, not the beginning of a literary career.

After his trial over Vollmer's death, Burroughs thought it prudent to leave Mexico. He spent more time traveling in South America researching the hallucinatory drug yage and corresponding with Allen Ginsberg, who was by this point acting as his literary agent, about his search for the drug and its effects. These letters formed the basis of Burroughs and Ginsberg's book The Yage Letters . After the yage quest, Burroughs returned, briefly, to New York where he initiated an intense but mostly one-sided romantic and sexual relationship with Ginsberg before leaving the United States for a brief stay in Rome and then Tangier.

While in Tangier Burroughs completed the text that would become The Naked Lunch. Interzone, as he called the working manuscript, was, in opposition to his earlier works Junkie and Queer, a non-linear collection of loosely connected episodes. Allen Ginsberg, who, along with Peter Orlovsky and Jack Kerouac, had traveled to Tangier to help collect and type a clean copy of the manuscript, presented The Naked Lunch to Maurice Girodias of the Olympia Press. Though Girodias was not initially interested in the work, he did decide to print it after all in 1959. An American edition, based on a 1958 manuscript of the novel (currently part of the Allen Ginsberg Papers held by the RBML) was published by Grove Press in 1962.

Burroughs then moved to Paris where he continued writing and producing the episodic sketches that, combined with material from The Naked Lunch manuscripts, comprise The Soft Machine, The Ticket that Exploded, and Nova Express. While in Paris living in a guesthouse christened the Beat Hotel with Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Gergory Corso, and Harold Chapman, Burroughs first came into contact with Brion Gysin. Gysin, a painter, had a profound impact on Burroughs and Gysin's "cut-up technique" where strips of two different texts were aligned to create a new, composite text became a prominent feature of Burroughs's future writing.

In 1974 Burroughs returned to the United States. He accepted a teaching post at City College of New York that Allen Ginsberg had recommended him for and settled into an apartment nicknamed The Bunker on Manhattan's Lower East Side. During this time Burroughs became acquainted with James Grauerholz, a young beat devotee who became Burroughs's devoted manager, secretary, and companion.

Burroughs moved to Lawrence Kansas in 1981 and remained there until his death in 1997. During the later part of his life he wrote less and less, focusing on visual art and spoken word performances. He also appears in the Gus Van Sant movie Naked Cowboy.

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