French Literature Reviews - 2026
W. Burroughs, Essays
Writers: Biography, Letters and Memoirs
William Burroughs
Essays,
Paris, Christian Bourgois éd., 2008
EAN: 9782267020014
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Publisher's description:
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, while continuing his work in fiction, William Burroughs relentlessly published papers, articles, lecture and conference notes, and short fictional pieces he termed routines across numerous magazines and journals.
This volume brings together a selection of these writings. The first section features his pieces on Jack Kerouac and his reflections on the craft of writing. The second group of essays gathers texts dedicated to 20th-century literature, from Ernest Hemingway to Graham Greene, and Jean Genet to Samuel Beckett. He explores the foundations of the art of writing, its methodology, purpose, instruction, and impact on the contemporary world.
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Born in St. Louis in 1914, William Burroughs moved to New York after completing his studies and settled with Joan Vollmer—whom he married in 1946—in an apartment shared with Jack Kerouac and Edie Parker.
It was during this period that he met Allen Ginsberg and developed a heroin addiction. He began writing around 1950 and accidentally killed his wife in 1951. He then vanished to South America before settling in Tangier in 1954. Following addiction treatment in London, he moved into a Paris hotel where he developed the "cut-up" technique. In 1975, he returned to live in New York, where he earned recognition as a major figure in American literature.
He died in 1997 at the age of 83. The majority of his work was published by Christian Bourgois.
William Burroughs occupied a singular position within the American literary landscape of the post-war period, associated closely with the Beat generation alongside figures such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. His development of experimental composition methods, most notably the cut-up technique refined during his time in Paris, challenged conventional narrative structures and exerted a lasting influence on avant-garde writing. The intellectual currents of the 1960s and 1970s often engaged with the intersection of art, technology, and countercultural critique, themes that resonated deeply throughout his broader body of work and his various shorter prose pieces.
This collection gathers a range of shorter texts, conference notes, and articles published across various journals during the 1960s and 1970s, alongside pieces of short fiction known as routines. The first section presents his writings on Jack Kerouac alongside reflections on the craft of writing. The second part assembles texts concerning twentieth-century literature, engaging with figures such as Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, Jean Genet, and Samuel Beckett, while examining the foundations, methodology, purpose, and contemporary impact of the art of writing. Readers interested in twentieth-century American literature and experimental writing may find this volume relevant.