Call Me Burroughs: A Life by Barry Miles

(Twelve, $32)

William S. Burroughs was a drug addict, a murderer, a sex fiend, a pervert, a drunk, and an all-round creep, said Michael Dirda in The Washington Post. He was also charismatic, though, and “one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.” In this “mesmerizing page-turner” of a biography, you get the whole story—if you weren’t looking for a detailed consideration of Naked Lunch, Junky, or any of the rest of Burroughs’s oeuvre. Barry Miles, who knew his subject personally and has written biographies of other Beat legends, “recognizes why Burroughs matters” but focuses here on the man’s extraordinary life.

Though Miles doesn’t judge his subject, “Burroughs emerges as a largely unsympathetic and sad figure,” said Matthew Gilbert in The Boston Globe. Born into a wealthy St. Louis family in 1914, he “spent an inordinate amount of his lifetime scoring and using drugs,” and he regularly let down family and friends. He had sex with men and women, “but mostly with boys,” many of them impoverished, and when he fatally shot his wife in Mexico in 1951 while attempting a drunken William Tell–like stunt, he sloughed off his young son on the boy’s grandparents, barely bothering to see him again. Reading about all this left me “simultaneously turned off and fascinated.” No matter how deep Burroughs’s flaws, “he makes for a captivating anti-hero.”

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“There’s a good story inside Call Me Burroughs,” but Miles makes you wade through too much arcane detail to find it, said Noah Cruickshank in the A.V. Club. He “clearly has more information than he knows what to do with” and so “opts to keep everything.” Die-hard Burroughs fans might be thankful for the effort, especially because across his long life, he “always seemed to be in the right place at the right time,” and “the glut of fascinating people he knew is jaw-dropping.” But the world is not populated by die-hards only. “For people looking for an introduction to the man’s life and work, reading his Wikipedia page would save a lot of time.”