William Seward Burroughs II was an American writer and visual artist born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1914. He is widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a postmodern author whose work influenced underground and popular culture and literature. Much of Burroughs's work is experimental and features unreliable narrators. His writing is noted as semi-autobiographical, often drawing from his experiences with drug addiction and featuring his various places of residence as settings. With collaborator Brion Gysin, Burroughs popularized the cut-up, an aleatory literary technique that became influential in experimental writing. Burroughs's fiction frequently engaged with mystical, occult, and magical themes, which were constant preoccupations in both his work and his personal life. He died in Lawrence, Kansas in 1997.