Private Eye

Whenever people first met Burroughs, they thought he was a private eye, or worked for the FBI, because he always wore a three-piece suit, a striped tie, and a fedora hat. From 1938 on, his parents sent him $200.00 a month, and that’s how he could bounce from New York to Paris to Tangiers, where he finished Naked Lunch. The locals in Tangiers called him “El Hombre Invisible” — “The Invisible Man.”

William S. Burroughs’s books include Junkie (1953), The Soft Machine (1961), and The Ticket That Exploded (1962).

On writing, he said: “The only way I can write narrative is to get right outside my body and experience it. This can be exhausting and at times dangerous. One cannot be sure of redemption.”

Writers Almanac