The New York Public Library Acquires Archive of Avant-Garde Beat Writer William S. Burroughs

Collection Joins the Archives of Jack Kerouac and Other Beat-Related Materials in the Library's Berg Collection, the Leading Center for Study of Beat Literature

The New York Public Library's Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature has acquired the archive of the avant-garde Beat writer William S. Burroughs (1914-1997). Containing Burroughs' manuscripts and correspondence from the early 1950s to the early 1970s, the richest portion of his writing career, and including items such as the typescript and draft versions of his seminal novel The Naked Lunch, the archive previously had only two private owners aside from Burroughs himself and has never been publicly accessible.

An exegesis of Burroughs' novel The Soft Machine, a calligraphic painting of his used for the novel's dust jacket, and a photograph of his typewriter. The William S. Burroughs Archive, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library. Photo: The New York Public Library

"Burroughs' archive is a fantastic addition to the Berg Collection and solidifies The New York Public Library's position as the world's leading center for the study of Beat literature," said Dr. Paul LeClerc, President and Chief Executive Officer of The New York Public Library. "The Burroughs Archive joins the Jack Kerouac Archive, as well as manuscripts, letters, and other items created by and related to Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, and a very large collection of Beat and Beat-related books, pamphlets, broadsides, and photographs."

The papers were originally assembled and organized in 1972 by Burroughs and his friend and occasional collaborator, the avant-garde Swiss-Canadian painter Brion Gysin. It was catalogued by renowned Beat historian and author Barry Miles and originally sold to Roberto Altmann of Liechtenstein. This effort resulted in the publication of The Descriptive Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive (1973). The Library acquired the archive from noted book collector and attorney Robert H. and his wife Donna L. Jackson, of Shaker Heights, Ohio. The agent for the sale was Ken Lopez of Massachusetts, a noted rare book and manuscript dealer specializing in modern American and British literature.

The archive's correspondence includes hundreds of unpublished letters to Burroughs, often accompanied by carbon copies of Burroughs' replies, from scores of writers and artists, including Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Terry Southern, Timothy Leary, J.G. Ballard, Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), the French sound poet Henri Chopin, and especially numerous examples from Allen Ginsberg and Paul Bowles. Unpublished letters to Burroughs include letters from Kerouac, Leary, Ginsberg, Leroi Jones, Chopin, Corso, Ferlinghetti, Bowles, and Southern.

"Not only was Burroughs one of the three progenitors of the Beat movement and an avant-garde writer who influenced and was influenced by such movements as Surrealism, Fluxus, British 'New Wave' Science Fiction, the Post-Beat, and Concrete Poetry, but he may also be regarded as one of twentieth-century America's great satirists, fiercely sinister and corrosive," said Isaac Gewirtz, Curator of the Berg Collection. "This aspect of his work complements the archives of Terry Southern and Bruce Jay Friedman, which are also in the Berg. The addition of Burroughs' papers has created a particularly rich resource for the study of alternative versions of the post-War myth of the American dream. The archive is particularly interesting because Burroughs clearly intended it, primarily through its organization and the art/word illustrations on its folders, to be read and absorbed as a work of art in itself."

"Preserving archives that show the development of an artist's work from ideas to final form is invaluable to researchers," said David S. Ferriero, Andrew W. Mellon Director and Chief Executive of the Research Libraries. "In other divisions of The New York Public Library's Research Libraries, scholars have access to books, essays, articles, screenplays, photos, and numerous additional materials that reflect the broad impact of these works once they enter the culture at large. The Library offers researchers the opportunity to trace a work's life from artistic impulse to its ongoing influence in today's culture."

"Donna and I are most pleased that this important material by one of America's greatest creative talents will have a good home at The New York Public Library, making it available to scholars, students, and anyone interested in the origins of the Beat Generation," said Robert Jackson.

William S. Burroughs

Burroughs' seaman papers. The William S. Burroughs Archive, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library. Photo: The New York Public Library.

William S. Burroughs was born in 1914 to a wealthy family in St.Louis, Missouri. After an early life filled with the dichotomy of privilege and adolescent mischief, Burroughs graduated from Harvard in 1936, where he studied Shakespeare under George Kittredge. After college, Burroughs, though gay, married Ilse Klapper, a Jewish woman he met while traveling in Austria, so that she could obtain a United States visa; they divorced later, in America. Burroughs later took classes as an anthropology graduate student at Harvard, enrolled in medical school in Vienna and enlisted (briefly) in the U.S. Army in 1941; he didn't complete his studies, and he was dismissed from the army for psychological reasons.

After residing in Chicago for a brief period, Burroughs moved to New York in 1943, where he met Columbia University students Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac; he and his future wife Joan Vollmer Adams later lived with Kerouac and Kerouac's first wife Edie Parker, in Morningside Heights. In the mid- and late 40s and early 1950s, Burroughs became a drug addict; moved to New Orleans; had a son, William S. Burroughs, Jr., with Adams in 1947; and shot his wife during a drunken game of "William Tell" in Mexico City in 1951.

After Vollmer's death and a stint traveling through South America looking for a drug called Yage (thought to ease opiate addiction), Burroughs became a writer, first writing Junkie about his heroin addiction, and then writing Queer about his homosexuality. Still in touch with Ginsberg and Kerouac, Burroughs continued traveling, going to Rome and Tangier, Morocco, where he began writing his masterpiece Naked Lunch and met Brion Gysin, Jane Auer, and Paul Bowles, who was the single-most influential writer on the Beat triumvirate of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs. Moving to the "Beat Hotel" in Paris in 1956, Ginsberg and Kerouac helped edit Naked Lunch and continued their friendship. Naked Lunch received fulsome praise from many writers, including Norman Mailer and J. G. Ballard. It also was prosecuted by the state of Massachusetts and judged to be "obscene;" this decision was overturned in 1966 by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

After moving to London in the early 1960s and publishing a trilogy of novels (The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, Nova Express), Burroughs returned to New York City in the 1970s, teaching writing at New York City College, living in the Lower East Side, and exchanging ideas with various New York artists and writers, including Andy Warhol, Susan Sontag, Patti Smith, and Terry Southern.

In New York, Burroughs also met and worked with his manager, editor, and biographer James Grauerholz. In the 1980s, he completed another trilogy of novels (Cities of the Red Night, Place of Dead Roads, The Western Lands) and became a countercultural icon to younger generations. His work turned to spoken word performance, and he recorded with Laurie Anderson, Ministry, and Bill Laswell's Material. Burroughs also appeared in director Gus Van Sant's 1989 film Drugstore Cowboy.

In the 1990s Burroughs settled in Lawrence, Kansas. Director David Cronenberg made a full-length feature film of Naked Lunch, and Burroughs continued his spoken word art with musical artists such as R.E.M., Kurt Cobain (of Nirvana), and Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy; he even released his own spoken word album in 1990. He worked with director Robert Wilson and Tom Waits to create the internationally performed play The Black Rider. The avant-garde Beat writer also worked in the visual arts later in his life, creating paint-splattered landscapes often augmented with sketches, stencils, collage and/or paint. William S. Burroughs died from complications of a heart attack in Lawrence, Kansas on August 2, 1997.

About The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature was established at The New York Public Library on October 11, 1940. A gift of Albert Berg (1872-1950) in memory of his brother Henry (1858-1938), eminent physicians at Mt. Sinai Hospital, it comprised 3,500 volumes of rare editions of English and American literature, as well as an endowment for the collection's housing and development. Subsequent large purchases by Albert Berg and curatorial purchases made possible by his bequest, as well as the generous gifts of generations of donors, have increased the collection's size to 30,000 rare books and 2,000 linear feet of literary manuscripts and archives, including journals, diaries, correspondence, and photographs, representing the work and lives of more than 400 authors. Printed books date from William Caxton's 1480 edition of the Chronicles of England to the present day, and the manuscripts date from the early 17th century, though the most extensive manuscript holdings date from the period 1820-1980. The many notable authors whose manuscripts and correspondence are housed in the Berg include Charles Dickens, Henry James, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, T.S.Eliot, W.H. Auden, and Saul Bellow. The Berg is also home to the archives of Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Terry Southern, Kenneth Koch, and Paul Auster, among other important writers and poets.  

Exhibitions featuring the Berg Collection's holdings are mounted at the Library, in the D. Samuel and Jeane H. Gottesman Exhibition Hall and in the Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Gallery, and presentations of selected materials are regularly offered to undergraduate and graduate classes in English and American literature. Each year, scholars from across the country and around the world conduct research at the Berg, publishing scores of articles and books based on its resources.

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Contact:    Gayle Snible    212.704.8600

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