Burroughs' major works can be divided into four different periods. The dates refer to the time of writing, not publication, which in some cases was not until decades later:

  • Early work (early 1950s): Junkie, Queer and The Yage Letters are relatively straightforward linear narratives, written in and about Burroughs' time in Mexico City and South America.

  • The cut-up period (mid-1950s to mid-1960s): Although published before Burroughs discovered the cut-up technique, Naked Lunch is a fragmentary collection of "routines" from The Word Hoard – manuscripts written in Tangier, Paris, London, as well as of some other texts written in South America such as "The Composite City", blending into the cut-up and fold-in fiction also partly drawn from The Word Hoard: The Soft Machine, Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded, also referred to as "The Nova Trilogy" or "The Cut-Up Trilogy", self-described by Burroughs as an attempt to create "a mythology for the space age". Interzone also derives from the mid-1950s.

  • Experiment and subversion (mid-1960s to mid-1970s): This period saw Burroughs continue experimental writing with increased political content and branching into multimedia such as film and sound recording. The only major novel written in this period was The Wild Boys, but he also wrote dozens of published articles, short stories, scrap books and other works, several in collaboration with Brion Gysin. The major anthologies representing work from this period are The Burroughs File, The Adding Machine and Exterminator!.

  • The Red Night trilogy (mid-1970s to mid-1980s): The books Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands came from Burroughs in a final, mature stage, creating a complete mythology.

Burroughs also produced numerous essays and a large body of autobiographical material, including a book with a detailed account of his own dreams (My Education: A Book of Dreams).

Biography


Novels and other long fiction :

    Junkie (aka Junky) (1953)
    Queer (written 1951-3; published 1985)
    Naked Lunch (1959)
    The Nova Trilogy (1961-67):
        The Soft Machine (1961/66)
        The Ticket That Exploded (1962/67)
        Nova Express (1964)
    The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (1969)
    The Wild Boys: A Book Of The Dead (1971)
    Port of Saints (1973)
    The Red Night Trilogy (1981-87):
        Cities of the Red Night (1981)
        The Place of Dead Roads (1983)
        The Western Lands (1987)
    My Education: A Book of Dreams (1995)

Note: Burroughs published revised and rewritten editions of several of the above novels, including The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded, while re-edited versions of some books such as Junkie and Naked Lunch have been published posthumously.

Non-fiction and letters :

    "Letter From A Master Addict To Dangerous Drugs," British Journal of Addiction, Vol. 53, No. 2, 3 August 1956
    The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs (1969) (with Daniel Odier)
    Jack Kerouac (1970) (with Claude Pelieu)
    The Electronic Revolution (1971)
    The Retreat Diaries (1976) - later included in The Burroughs File
    Letters to Allen Ginsberg 1953-1957 (1976)
    Selected Letters (1993)
    The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1945-1959 (1993)
    Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs (2000)
    Everything Lost: The Latin American Notebook of William S. Burroughs (2007)
    Rub Out The Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1959-1974 (2012)

Stories and novellas :

    Valentine's Day Reading (1965)
    Time (1965)
    APO-33 (1966)
    The Dead Star (1969)
    Ali's Smile (1971)
    Mayfair Academy Series More or Less (1973)
    White Subway (1973) - later included in The Burroughs File
    The Book of Breeething (1974)
    Snack... (1975)
    Cobble Stone Gardens (1976) - later included in The Burroughs File
    Blade Runner (a movie) (1979)
    Dr. Benway (1979)
    Die Alten Filme (The Old Movies) (1979) - later included in The Burroughs File
    Streets of Chance (1981)
    Early Routines (1981)
    Sinki's Sauna (1982)
    Ruski (1984)
    The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1984)
    The Cat Inside (1986)
    The Whole Tamale (c.1987-88)
    Interzone (1989)
    Tornado Alley (1989)
    Ghost of Chance (1991)
    Seven Deadly Sins (1992)
    Paper Cloud; Thick Pages (1992)

Collections :

    Interzone (written mid-1950s, published 1988)
    Roosevelt After Inauguration and Other Atrocities (1965)
    Dead Fingers Talk (1963) - excerpts from Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded combined together to create a new narrative
    Exterminator! (1973) - a different book from the 1960 collaboration with Brion Gysin
    Ali's Smile: Naked Scientology (1978)
    Ah Pook is Here, Nova Express, Cities of the Red Night (1981)
    The Burroughs File (1984)
    The Adding Machine: Collected Essays (1985)
    Three Novels - Grove Press omnibus of The Soft Machine, Nova Express and The Wild Boys (1988)
    Uncommon Quotes Vol. 1 (1989)
    Word Virus: The William Burroughs Reader (1998)
    Conversations with William S. Burroughs (2000)
    Burroughs Live : The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960-1997 (2000)

Collaborations :

    And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (1945; published November 2008) (with Jack Kerouac)
    Minutes To Go (1960) (with Sinclair Beilles, Gregory Corso and Brion Gysin)
    The Exterminator (1960) (with Brion Gysin)
    The Yage Letters (1963) (with Allen Ginsberg)
    So Who Owns Death TV? (1967) (with Claude Pelieu and Carl Weissner)
    Rules of Duel (1970; republished 2010) (primarily by Graham Masterton, but Burroughs receives co-author credit)
    Brion Gysin Let the Mice In (1973) (with Brion Gysin)
    Sidetripping (1975) (with Charles Gatewood)
    Colloque de Tangier (1976) (with Brion Gysin)
    The Third Mind (1977) (with Brion Gysin)
    Colloque de Tangier Vol. 2 (1979) (with Brion Gysin and Gérard-Georges Lemaire)
    Ah Pook Is Here and Other Texts (1979) (with Malcolm McNeill)
    Apocalypse (1988) (with Keith Haring)
    The Black Rider (1989) (with Tom Waits and Robert Wilson)