William Burroughs killed his wife Joan Vollmer in a drunken game of William Tell in Mexico City in 1951. He spent the rest of his life writing some of the most transgressive literature in the English language and claiming that an entity he called the Ugly Spirit had guided his hand.

This episode examines his life from a privileged St. Louis childhood through the writing of Naked Lunch, the cut-up experiments, and his late-career cult status, asking whether his art redeemed or merely obscured the violence at its center.

• The killing of Joan Vollmer and how it shaped everything he wrote after
• Naked Lunch and the obscenity trial that made him a literary icon
• The cut-up technique and its influence on punk, industrial music, and David Bowie
• What he meant by the Ugly Spirit and whether he ever escaped it