Fifty years after Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs first met in Manhattan, New York University sponsored a conference celebrating the legacy of the Beat Generation. Burroughs, whose picture appeared prominently in several places on the elaborate brochure announcing the conference, was not listed as a participant. At the beginning of the main event, a series of performances at New York's Town Hall that included many of the prominent figures from the Beat Generation and those they influenced, Burroughs addressed the conference from his home in Lawrence, Kansas, through an amplified telephone hookup. Speaking in his trademark laconic style, he offered what The New York Times called "flinty, deadpan advice on writing and life." Once seen as a wild boy of beatitude, Burroughs at eighty appeared to be an elder statesman of an artistic impulse originally scorned by the literary establishment but now firmly a part...