William Seward Burroughs , poet and novelist, was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on 5 February 1914 to parents from two important American families. Burroughs's mother, Laura Lee, was a direct descendant of Robert E. Lee, and his father, Perry Mortimer Burroughs, was the son of the industrialist who invented the cylinder which made the modern adding machine possible. Burroughs had a restless childhood in St. Louis, dominated by his mother's obsessive Victorian prudery, and haunted by horrible nightmares. As the son of St. Louis aristocracy he attended private schools there until the age of fifteen, when he was sent to an all-male academy in Los Alamos, New Mexico. While in Los Alamos, Burroughs developed interest in two apparently unrelated areas: literature and crime. His reading in Baudelaire, Gide, and Wilde was balanced with thoughts of mobsters.

At Harvard University he studied literature with John Livingston Lowes and George Lyman Kittredge...