It’s the birthday of William S. Burroughs (1914-1997), a writer of the Beat Generation and every bit as much fun as your average Beat Generation author or maybe even a little more so, so let’s get this over with.

Burroughs was born in St. Louis, Missouri. His father owned a plate glass company and his grandfather was the inventor of the Burroughs adding machine. When he was 14, Burroughs injured his hand and received morphine for the pain, and then began experimenting with drugs. He disliked school but graduated from Harvard with honors in 1936. Then he traveled to Europe, met a German Jew, and married her just long enough to help her get to the U.S. Burroughs then worked a number of odd jobs—things like private detective and exterminator. He returned to Harvard to dabble in graduate work, got drafted when the war began, and was discharged after just a few months on psychiatric grounds.

Burroughs moved to New York, started hanging with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and got addicted to heroin. Though gay, he married a woman named Joan Vollmer, and by 1951 they were living in Mexico City and both using drugs (her thing was Benzedrine). One day, while drinking with friends, Burroughs got out a gun and joked, “It’s time for our William Tell act.” His wife obliged by putting a water glass on her head. (Trigger warning: this does not go well. No ghastly pun intended.) Burroughs fired the weapon and accidentally shot his wife in the head, killing her immediately. Burroughs himself was devastated (although, you know, not dead). Burroughs’ lawyer then went and shot someone himself and had to flee the country, so Burroughs did the same. He was convicted of manslaughter in absentia. Burroughs later said that Joan’s death was what forced him to be a writer.

In 1953, Burroughs published Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict. In 1959, he was treated for his addiction and published The Naked Lunch in Paris, republished in the U.S. in 1962 as Naked Lunch. The novel is half satire, half hallucination, and Burroughs claimed the chapters were meant to be read in any order, so…maybe not for the lover of traditional narration. Burroughs went on to write a number of other things as well, none of which received as much attention as Naked Lunch, and was evidently high most of the time when he was writing; one critic wrote, “The drugs help account for the hollowness of his voices, which jabber, joke, and rant like ghosts in a cave” (Peter Schjeldahl, “The Outlaw,” The New Yorker, Feb. 3, 2014).

Burroughs had had a son, Billy, with Joan, and outlived him. Billy died at 33 after a messed-up life thanks to crappy parenting and drugs. Burroughs himself died at 83 in Lawrence, Kansas, after a heart attack.

You know what? Let’s all read some Trollope today, or maybe Austen, something with a good strong story line, and take nothing stronger than low doses of ibuprofen, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.