SOURCE: "Beat Author William S. Burroughs Dies at 83," in The Washington Post, August 4, 1997, p. B4.

[In the following essay, Weil summarizes the highlights of Burroughs's life and career.]

William S. Burroughs, 83, whose efforts to transmute into literature the events and visions of a tormented life earned him fame as an artistic innovator and a founder of the Beat Generation, died Aug. 2 in Kansas.

Mr. Burroughs, who had resided since the early 1980s in Lawrence, Kan., after a knockabout life on four continents, died at Lawrence Memorial Hospital. He had been admitted Aug. 1 after a heart attack.

Much of Mr. Burroughs's enduring literary fame rests on Naked Lunch, the controversial 1959 novel that was hailed for groundbreaking creativity and denounced as vile filth.

In that book and in later writing, Mr. Burroughs employed a highly personalized stream-of-consciousnessstyle to which literary critics have traced much of the work that characterized the...