Forajido literario

Almost everyone knows three things about William Burroughs: he was a junkie, he wrote Naked Lunch, he killed his wife. What not everyone knows, however, is the extent to which his life traces a secret history of the 20th century (as a couple of buttons show: his maternal uncle was Hitler's public relations and his son was operated on by the "inventor" of liver transplants) or to what extent its imprint on the arts becomes deep and persistent. Friend and mentor of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, he stood out as one of the main references of the beat generation. Although their writing styles had nothing to do with each other, all three shared a disconnect with the values ??prevailing in America after World War II and saw themselves as outcasts in a hostile culture, vain of an impending apocalypse. Each of them wrote a revolutionary work of lasting value (Naked Lunch, On the Road and Howl) in which they expressed their visceral responses to the upheavals of the time. As a heroin addict, homosexual, anarchist and criminal, Burroughs felt suffocated in his homeland and opted for exile. During his years of exile, in the course of which he lived in places as different as Mexico, Peru, Tangier, Paris or London, he carried out a pilgrimage through the Amazon basin to study the effects of ayahuasca, he established a close relationship with other authors such as Paul Bowles, Brian Gysin or Jean Genet, collaborated with Dr. Timothy Leary in his studies of psilocybin, was one of the first serious researchers in Scientology and developed avant-garde multimedia techniques that would have a decisive influence on dozens of writers, musicians, visual artists and filmmakers, from J. G. Ballard and William Gibson to Kathy Acker and Will Self, from David Bowie and Patti Smith to Throbbing Gristle and Ministry, from Robert Rauschenberg to Keith Haring, from Anthony Balch to David Cronenberg. Meanwhile, his groundbreaking masterpiece, Naked Lunch, so shook up the literary and social scene with its detailed and scatological scenes of drug addiction and sexual perversion that it was kidnapped and put on trial, leading to a decisive Supreme Court ruling that virtually ended literary censorship in the United States.