William Seward Burroughs was born in Saint Louis, Missouri, to Perry Mortimer Burroughs, son of the industrialist who invented the cylinder that made the modern adding machine possible, and Laura Lee, a direct descendant of Robert E. Lee, Civil War general and commander in chief of the Confederate army. Dominated by his mother's obsessive Victorian prudery and haunted by vivid nightmares and hallucinations, Burroughs led a restless childhood. He was educated in private schools in Saint Louis and Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he developed seemingly disparate fascinations with literature and crime, and later studied literature (for lack of interest in any other subject) and anthropology at Harvard University, where he encountered a set of wealthy homosexuals. He graduated with an A.B. in 1936. Subsequently Burroughs traveled to Europe, briefly studied medicine in Vienna, and returned to the United States and Harvard to resume his study of anthropology...