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DID YA KNOW: William Burroughs coined the phrase ‘heavy metal’. The genre of loud rock music got its name from Burroughs’ 1961 novel The Soft Machine, in which a character named Uranian Willy, the Heavy Metal Kid, appears. The music world has been grateful ever since.  

The rock-band Steely Dan took their name from a Borroughs book, but I am going to leave that one alone, there may be kids in the room.


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.

While living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and out of their mutual influence grew the foundation of the Beat Generation, which was later a defining influence on the 1960s counterculture.

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.

His work has had a considerable influence on science fiction. Although not an SF author himself, Burroughs – and the cult that grew up around his work in the 1960s – struck a chord with a number of important writers of speculative fiction and science fiction, notably J. G. Ballard and William Gibson.



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