Today in Literary History – September 6, 1951 – the day William S. Burroughs shot and killed his wife
Today in Literary History – September 6, 1951 – the day William S. Burroughs shot and killed his wife
On September 6, 1951, Beat Generation writer William Burroughs killed his common-law wife Joan Vollmer during a drunken party trick that got way out of hand. Burroughs later said he had "eight or ten drinks... I don't remember exactly," before he tried to shoot a highball glass that was balanced on her head. Instead, he shot her in the forehead, killing her almost instantly. This is the tragic true story of Joan Vollmer, the Beat Generation muse killed by her own husband — click the link in our profile to read more.
On September 6, 1951, William S. Burroughs shot his wife, Joan, through the forehead after she had placed a glass on her head in a “William Tell” game. The killing, at a party in Mexico City, was the most infamous incident in the controversial writer’s life, notes Rob Johnson, who teaches at the University of Texas-Pan American. Yet when Burroughs, then 37, shot his wife, he was not yet the author of Junky, Queer, and Naked Lunch. He was, the New York Daily News said, “a wealthy cotton planter from Pharr, Texas.” True, kind of. Burroughs had left South Texas, but fairly recently.
On September 6, 1951, William S. Burroughs, famous now for his hallucinatory novels such as Junkyand Naked Lunch, shot and killed his wife Joan Vollmer at a drunken house party in Mexico City, where they were living at the time.
Stories about the shooting vary wildly but the tale that Burroughs and Joan were enacting a version of William Tell and the apple has coalesced into legend.
In this story Burroughs, who was a gun fanatic who prided himself on his marksmanship no matter how much drugs and booze he consumed, had Joan balance a glass of gin on her head and intended to shoot it off, an act they had reportedly performed several times before.
Stories about the shooting vary wildly but the tale that Burroughs and Joan were enacting a version of William Tell and the apple has coalesced into legend.
On this occasion his aim was off (or perhaps not, according to some conspiracy-minded friends) and he shot Joan in the forehead. She was only 28 years old.
Burroughs was arrested, but thanks to his family’s vast wealth (his grandfather invented the adding machine) and the notoriously corrupt Mexican legal system, he escaped back to America. He was convicted of manslaughter in absentia.
Burroughs always denied the William Tell story but his own accounts of that night are contradictory.
I’ve always found Burroughs and his work pretty odious. I wonder why?
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