Brion Gysin is regarded as one of the most influential and visionary of living poets and painters. After a chance encounter with William S. Burroughs on the Place Saint-Michel in Paris in 1958 resulted in Gysin's moving into the famous Beat Hotel at 9 rue Git-le-Coeur in the Latin Quarter, he introduced Burroughs to his inventive techniques of the cut-ups and permutations, and thus began one of the most important collaborations in modern literature.

A naturalized United States citizen of Swiss extraction, Gysin was born in Taplow House, Taplow, Bucks, United Kingdom. After the death of his father when Gysin was nine months old, his mother took him to New York to stay with one of her sisters and then to Kansas City, Missouri, to stay with another. He finished high school at the age of fifteen in Edmonton, Alberta, and was sent for two years to the prestigious English...