The final personal journals of novelist William S. Burroughs have been donated to the University of Kansas.
Burroughs lived in Lawrence from 1982 until his death in 1997. Besides the journals, the donation to the Kenneth Spencer Research Library includes typescripts and editing materials. The materials were the source for “Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs,” published in 2000.
Estate executor James Grauerholz said in a university news release that the school was a fitting recipient because Burroughs wrote his last books, painted his first and last paintings and jotted down his last words in Lawrence.
Burroughs, novelist Jack Kerouac and others became known in the 1950s and 1960s as the Beat Generation of writers who railed against the mainstream.
