(1914 – 1997) Novelist and icon of gay and drug subcultures. Burroughs befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, key members of the beat generation, in New York City, NY in the 1940s, became a heroin addict and accidentally shot his wife dead in Mexico (1951).

Ginsberg was instrumental in the publication of Junky (1953), a pitiless account of addiction. Best remembered for the inventive, hallucinatory Naked Lunch (1959), which was subject to a legal battle in the United States after it was censored by the US Post Office, Customs Service and a state government. He also invented “cutups,” a literary equivalent to collage.