This Week in Literary History: William S. Burroughs Kills Joan Vollmer in a Drunken Game of “William Tell”

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On the day of September 6, 1951, successful a friend’s Mexico City apartment, a drunk William S. Burroughs pulled retired his handgun and (supposedly) said to his wife, Joan Vollmer, “It’s clip for our William Tell act.” Vollmer (supposedly) laughed and placed a drinking solid connected apical of her head. Burroughs, known to beryllium an adept shot, fired his gun, but missed the solid and alternatively changeable Vollmer successful the head, sidesplitting her. She was 28.

Before her death, Vollmer had been an influential member of the Beat Generation; the flat she shared with Edie Parker was a favored gathering spot for Burroughs and his friends, including Jack Kerouac (who Edie would aboriginal marry), Allen Ginsberg, and Lucien Carr. “Brilliant and good versed successful doctrine and literature, Joan was the whetstone against which the main Beat writers—Allen, Jack, and Bill—sharpened their intellect,” wrote Brenda Knight successful The Women of the Beat Generation. “Widely considered 1 of the astir perceptive radical successful the group, her beardown caput and autarkic quality helped bulldoze the Beats toward a caller sensibility.”

Then she was gone. Burroughs was arrested and held connected execution charges for 2 weeks; helium aboriginal (after speaking to a lawyer) changed his story, arsenic helium would respective times, telling a justice that his weapon had misfired. He was convicted of transgression negligence and served small clip successful jail. The details stay unproveable, and reports of the lawsuit vary, adjacent from the fewer eyewitnesses, but the fable has remained. If you cognize 1 happening astir Burroughs, you astir apt cognize this.

Later, in his instauration to Queer, Burroughs wrote: “I americium forced to the appalling decision that I would ne'er person go a writer but for Joan’s death, and to a realization of the grade to which this lawsuit has motivated and formulated my writing.” He added, “I unrecorded with the changeless menace of possession, and a changeless request to flight from possession, from Control. So the decease of Joan brought maine successful interaction with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered maine into a lifelong struggle, successful which I person had nary prime but to constitute my mode out.”