Um, why?

So yeah, seems like despite some unfortunate liquidation choices by his parents just before the depression, they still retained enough wealth to make certain lifestyle choices easy...

> His parents, upon his graduation, had decided to give him a monthly allowance of $200 out of their earnings from Cobblestone Gardens, a substantial sum in those days.

> It was enough to keep him going, and indeed it guaranteed his survival for the next twenty-five years, arriving with welcome regularity. The allowance was a ticket to freedom; it allowed him to live where he wanted to and to forgo employment. [1^]

And $200 in 1937 gets you a fair bit of freedom (roughly $4500 in today's money) - sure, it's not private jet money but notable. And would have gone pretty far in Mexico and Tangier.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs

[2]: https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1937?amount=200

It's a long time ago that I read about this, but I think he got money from his parents, who owned something of a tourist shop. I think they divested any shares they had in Burroughs long before this. In any case Bill (Naked Lunch) didn't have any shares in the company, and more or less parasitised his parents - but who amongst us can say that we haven't done that? certainly not me.

>> He was popular among the fringe, mostly because it was "cool" to be a part of the non-conformist subculture

He was popular among me, because when I worked in a factory doing manual labor in the 90's, his poems described the life I was living.

It was neither fringe, nor "cool", nor non-comformist, nor part of a subculture.

He was a good writer who wrote about what I was going through.

Burroughs was just fucking crazy. I liked his writing too. Not the cut-up stuff.

Exterminator!

bukowski wrote over 5,000 poems. he was bound to have some good ones and plenty of bad ones. also had a couple o' good novel/a hits.