“Beginning of the Beats” William Seward Burroughs

“Beginning of the Beats”

William Seward Burroughs

a film by Thanasis Panou

based on the writings

of William S. Burroughs

VIDEO 

William Seward Burroughs

February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997)

was an American novelist, short story writer, satirist, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer. Burroughs was a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author who wrote in the paranoid fiction genre, and his influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. 

Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films.

(Writer, philosopher, artist, and co-founder of the Beat Generation, William S. Burroughs—who died in 1997 at the age of 83—continues to be a vital cultural force today. 

The author of books like Junky, Queer, and Naked Lunch, Burroughs forged the cornerstone of a modern American cultural movement with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and other visionary writers and artists. 

His buttoned-up, three-piece exterior cloaked a dark genius that hungered for hustlers and heroin — way back in the 1940s. 

On February 5, William S. Burroughs would have been 97, but his spirit undoubtedly lives on, with more about him still coming out.)

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Gregory Corso -Beat G-

video

Last night I drove a car

not knowing how to drive

not owning a car

I drove and knocked down

people I loved

...went 120 through one town.

I stopped at Hedgeville

and slept in the back seat

...excited about my new life. 

Gregory Corso

Gregory Corso was a key member of the Beat movement, a group of convention-breaking writers who were credited with sparking much of the social and political change that transformed the United States in the 1960s. Corso's spontaneous, insightful, and inspirational verse once prompted fellow Beat poet Allen Ginsberg to describe him as an "awakener of youth." Although Corso enjoyed his greatest level of popularity during the 1960s and 1970s, he continued to influence contemporary readers and critics late into the twentieth century. Writing in the American Book Review, Dennis Barone remarked that Corso's 1989 volume of new and selected poems was a sign that "despite doubt, uncertainty, the American way, death all around, Gregory Corso will continue, and I am glad he will."