Call Me Burroughs: A Life - Hardcover

Miles, Barry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1455511951 ISBN 13: 9781455511952

Publisher: Twelve, 2014

Synopsis

Fifty years ago, Norman Mailer asserted, "William Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius." Few since have taken such literary risks, developed such individual political or spiritual ideas, or spanned such a wide range of media. Burroughs wrote novels, memoirs, technical manuals, and poetry. He painted, made collages, took thousands of photographs, produced hundreds of hours of experimental recordings, acted in movies, and recorded more CDs than most rock bands. Burroughs was the original cult figure of the Beat Movement, and with the publication of his novel Naked Lunch, which was originally banned for obscenity, he became a guru to the 60s youth counterculture. In Call Me Burroughs, biographer and Beat historian Barry Miles presents the first full-length biography of Burroughs to be published in a quarter century-and the first one to chronicle the last decade of Burroughs's life and examine his long-term cultural legacy. Written with the full support of the Burroughs estate and drawing from countless interviews with figures like Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, and Burroughs himself, Call Me Burroughs is a rigorously researched biography that finally gets to the heart of its notoriously mercurial subject.

About this title

About the Author

Barry Miles is the author of many seminal books on popular culture, including the authorized biography of Paul McCartney, Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now; Ginsberg: A Biography; William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible; Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats; and The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1957-1963. He also co-edited the Revised Text Edition of Naked Lunch. Miles was born in Cirencester, England.

Reviews

*Starred Review* Born to wealth and respectability in St. Louis, William Seward Burroughs (1914–97) relied on his parents’ support until his fifties, while submerged in an underworld of drugs and crime. His risky misadventures in New York, Chicago, Mexico City, Texas, New Orleans, London, Paris, and Tangiers stoked his incendiary, innovative, and influential books, including Naked Lunch (1959) and Cities of the Red Night (1981). On the centennial of Burroughs’ birth, accomplished biographer Miles turns in a torrentially detailed, explicit, and dramatic chronicle of Burroughs’ wild life as outlaw, social critic, writer, performer, and artist. Guru to the Beats, the counterculture, punk rockers, and cyberpunk writers, Burroughs was a walking paradox, a radical who dressed like a bureaucrat, a fierce advocate of freedom chained to his addictions. Though homosexual, he married a German Jew while in Europe during Hitler’s ascent, saving her life, then later accidentally killed his second wife. Miles illuminates every facet of Burroughs’ life, from his passions for guns and the occult to his depthless hunger for drugs and boys, visual and audio art, and crucial friendships with Allen Ginsberg and artist Brion Gysin. Nomadic Burroughs finally settled down in Lawrence, Kansas, thanks to James Grauerholz, who managed Burroughs’ famed reading tours and exhibits and gathered much of the arresting material Miles uses so powerfully in this forthrightly definitive biography. --Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Twelve
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1455511951
• ISBN 13: 9781455511952
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 736