William S Burroughs was born 100 years ago on 5 February 1914. Descended from a well-to-do family from St Louis, Missouri, he was a Harvard graduate, class of 1936. His early drug-fueled exploits with fellow Beats Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, immortalised in the 2013 film Kill Your Darlings, were legendary, as was his part in the accidental shooting death of his wife Joan during a drunken night in Mexico City in 1951.

Author Mary McCarthy once compared William S Burroughs to Jonathan Swift, noting a like-minded “soured optimism”. But she added, “Burroughs’ humor is peculiarly American, at once broad and sly. It is the humor of a comedian, a vaudeville performer.”

Naked Lunch, with its graphic sex, drugs, violence and slashing satire of consumerism, shocked Eisenhower-era Americans. Obscenity trials brought Burroughs, whose knowledge of the “algebra of need” came from his own lasting addiction, an irrevocable fame.

From his first novel, Junky, published in 1952, to his last public appearance in the video of U2’s The Last Night on Earth, weeks before he died on 2 August 1997, Burroughs was consistent: taciturn, sardonic, provocative and true to his outsider self and oddly formal sartorial style. His influence on generations of writers, musicians, and visual artists continues. In the words of Lou Reed, Burroughs “broke the door down”.

Beat historian Barry Miles, author of the newly published Call Me Burroughs, first met the author when he was living in Tangier, Morocco in 1964.

“He asked me to catalogue his archives – I used to run a bookshop. So I spent the best part of seven months with him, usually staying for drinks and dinner afterwards, as my girlfriend was in New York City. Bill's public persona was icy, daunting – absolutely no small talk, long silences – but when you got to know him he was a fabulous raconteur, usually after a few joints and a few drinks. He was very funny, often prancing about the room acting out some scene, and exaggerating stories to their very limits, making them outrageous and surreal.