William Seward Burroughs Jnr. always looked like the straight man among the Beat Generation, but his writing - violent, satirical, scatological, pornographic - makes the others look tame. Burroughs was born into middle-class respectability and after studying English at Harvard and medicine in Vienna, trained as a glider pilot with the American military but was discharged as unfit for service in 1942. While working in the New York shipyards he became addicted to heroin. His first book Junkie: confessions of an unredeemed drug addict was published under the pseudonym William Lee in 1953. His next novel Naked Lunch, 1959, was banned in the USA and first published by Maurice Girodias in Paris. It eventually came out in Britain in 1964. His later work became less outlandish.