American writer of experimental novels, who lived long times in Mexico City, Tanger, Paris, and London. Burroughs produced the bulk of his writing after he moved to London and took an apomorphine cure under the direction of Dr John Dent. We have lunch on the terrace of his mountain house. A heavily wooded garden with pools and paths stretches down to a cliff over the sea.
Lunch is turbot in cream sauce, grouse, wild asparagrass, peaches in wine.
Quite a change from the grey cafeteria food I have been subjected to in Western cities where I pass myself off as one of the faceless apathetic citizens searched and questioned by the police on every corner, set upon by brazen muggers, stumbling home to my burglarized apartment to find the narcotics squad going through my medicine chest again. His mother was a direct descendant of Robert E. Lee, his grandfather the inventor of the Burroughs adding machine. After he graduated in English literature from Harvard University in 1936, he traveled in Europe, where he studied medicine in Venice for a year. He worked for an advertising agency in New York City and joined the army. Burroughs was trained as a glider pilot, but was discharged as unfit for service in 1942.