A Life: Barry Miles

Product Description Authoritative biography of cult writer and author of NAKED LUNCH, William Burroughs (1914-1997).It has been 50 years since Norman Mailer asserted, 'I think that William Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.' This assessment holds true today. No-one since then has taken such risks in their writing, developed such individual radical political ideas, or spanned such a wide range of media - Burroughs has written novels, memoirs, technical manuals and poetry, he has painted, made collages, taken thousands of photographs, made visual scrapbooks, produced hundreds of hours of experimental tapes, acted in movies and recorded more CDs than most rock groups.Made a cult figure by the publication of NAKED LUNCH, Burroughs was a mentor to the 1960s youth culture. Underground papers referred to him as 'Uncle Bill' and he ranked alongside Bob Dylan and the Beatles, Buckminster Fuller and R.D. Laing as one of the 'gurus' of the youth movement who might just have the secret of the universe.Based upon extensive research, this biography paints a new portrait of Burroughs, making him real to the reader and showing how he was perceived by his contemporaries in all his guises - from icily distant to voluble drunk. It shows how his writing was very much influenced by his life situation and by the people he met on his travels around America and Europe. He was, beneath it all, a man torn by emotions: his guilt at not visiting his doting mother; his despair at not responding to reconciliation attempts from his father; his distance from his brother; the huge void that separated him from his son; and above all his killing of his wife, Joan Vollmer. Review 'Occult guru, literary genius, dystopian visionary, violent psychopath - no post-war writer has been so mythologised.' ― THE DAILY TELEGRAPH '...An astonishing and wholly successful attempt to give order to the glorious, terrifying chaos of Burroughs's long life. This 700-page book reads like a picaresque adventure and is utterly compelling.' -- PD Smith ― THE GUARDIAN Burrough's work I can do without. But the life- the life! The example of the life is indispensable: The ultimate un-American Dream... Barry Miles's book... has a kind of speed-freak intensity, with every detail recalled and brought vividly to life, a book of a million wows... Giant, blistering, painful warts, reproduced in brilliant Technicolour. A 700-page literary anatomy textbook: one of the most gratifying, sickening detailed biographies I have ever read. -- Ian Sansom ― LITERARY REVIEW It is an action-packed, sensational story -- Edmund Gordon ― THE SUNDAY TIMES Barry Miles has achieved something quite phenomenal: 600 oppressive yet irresistible pages that recount in intricate detail a sordid life...Miles is a great admirer of his subject, worked with him for 30 years and catalogued his archives. Yet despite that close connection he has produced a biography remarkable for its detachment and devoid of the obsessive worship that characterises the Burroughs cult. The life of this disturbing and disturbed man has never been so perfectly told. -- Gerard deGroot ― THE TIMES William S. Burroughs lived his life in the grand transgressive tradition of Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde and, like all dandies, he had a nose for hedonistic hot sports which he could mythologise along with himself. On the occasion of his centenary, Barry Miles takes us through these gorgeous, macabre scenarios with an attention to detail reminiscent of Dadd of Bosch... -- Duncan Fallowell ― THE SPECTATOR Mile's biography separates the cult from the man and shows us that there were, in fact, deep roots to Burroughs's other-worldly, alienated and unsettlingly affectless fiction - about which literary opinion is still divided. Which, 100 years after his birth, is quite impressive, really. -- Nicholas Lezard ― EVENING STANDARD It's enough to put you off breakfast ― THE MAIL ON SUNDAY