Burroughs, William S. (1914-1997)

American writer. With Naked Lunch (1959), Burroughs became, by the side of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, one of the three top writers associated with the Beat Generation, the movement that was a precursor to the hippie movement. In his early works he wrote about his own heroin addiction, and developed the notion of a Control, which would later be taken as a metaphor for contemporary societies. Later he pushed further his reflections on language and words, instruments of control par excellence because they are interiorised and used by each one of us. “The word is a virus,” he wrote. From this reflection on language, he moved to experimental writing based on cutting up texts and rearranging the cut-up pieces. This is, in a new sense, a metaleptic operation.