James Grauerholz and William S. Burroughs (photo by Jon Blumb)
William S. Burroughs, the avuncular and sardonic Beat sage and crusty cultural lightning rod, became, in his later years, the literary beacon of Lawrence, Kansas. Writers, musicians, artists and filmmakers would find their way to his quiet East Lawrence home to spend time or collaborate with Burroughs and his cats and his guns and the creative coterie that gathered around him in the decade and a half before his death in 1997.
Burroughs was something like a global citizen whose creative reputation ranged from perverse pied piper, whose drug-addled journeys and non-normative sexuality were uber-icky avoidances, to avant-garde visionary, who took adventurous readers deep into strange, threatening and ultimately enlightening worlds. Burroughs, scion of a St. Louis fortune, in his dapper duds and slow-dealing, nasal voice, was queer before queer was cool. His journey from arch-outsider to pop-cultural demigod provides a fascinating case study in the oscillating and intertwined dynamics of aesthetics, mass media, hipsterism, alienation and existential philosophy.
That his prodigal journey found its resolution in Lawrence we owe to another complicated visionary. James Grauerholz, a product of Coffeyville, Kansas, caught the fast-train to New York as a precocious, 21-year-old college dropout, slipped his way into the Bohemian circle of counter-cultural writers and artists, succumbed to Burroughs’ influence romantically for a while and later as assistant, manager, literary executor, caretaker and adopted son. Grauerholz has been credited with saving Burroughs’ life by extracting him from a self-destructive existence in downtown New York, transplanting him to a more nurturing environment in Kansas, and organizing his work in methodical ways that helped relaunch and further his publishing life and legacy.
Grauerholz died of pneumonia on the first day of 2026 at the age of 73. He’d been ill for some time and many of those who knew him say they hadn’t seen him in years. A memorial gathering took place a few days later in Lawrence, where friends and relatives remembered his generosity, his smarts, his early passion for comic books and later passion for music, and, of course, for his focused management of Burroughs’ business. One cousin expressed amazement that Jamie, as the family called him, not only knew the music but could count such notables as Iggy Pop and Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen as friends. A young musician emphasized how Grauerholz, in a compound of Lawrence properties, had created a welcoming community and refuge for aspiring creatives in need.
In Grauerholz, the longtime Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris eulogized online, Burroughs “found a collaborator able to stabilize the radically inventive but chaotic genius of Burroughs’ writing.” That genius reached its height in “Naked Lunch,” one of the most notorious of 20th-century American novels, which pushed the boundaries of scatological satire as its dark comedy mesmerized a generation of youthful rebels like Grauerholz.
Beginning in New York and blossoming in Lawrence under Grauerholz’s direction, Burroughs became aligned with theater and opera productions and with alt-pop musicians such as Laurie Anderson, Tom Waits and Patti Smith. The British band U2 made a video in Kansas City featuring Burroughs not long before his death. As the entrepreneurial founder of William Burroughs Communications Inc., Grauerholz shepherded new editions of Burroughs’ works, including discoveries from his archives, and helped Burroughs become seen more widely as a visual artist. His shotgun-blasted paintings and conceptual objects were shown in Lawrence galleries and far beyond. “James’ extensive and outstanding work as an editor has never been recognized,” Oliver Harris writes.
I’d gotten to know Grauerholz a bit beginning in the 1980s when I was writing about books for The Kansas City Star. He was the mostly congenial gatekeeper who managed Burroughs’ time and image at events and interview opportunities. Burroughs’ presence turned the weeklong River City Reunion in 1987 into a Felliniesque, Reagan-era carnival of dissenting expression in words and music. (Grauerholz had produced a similar Burroughs-focused affair a decade earlier in New York.) Allen Ginsberg, Ed Sanders, Anne Waldman, one of Jack Kerouac’s ex-wives, the Dead Kennedys and a Burroughs reading in a packed auditorium — the Beat spirit ruled.
Ten years later Burroughs was dead at 83. When the BBC got in touch with me that night all the radio guy wanted to know about was that horrid episode in 1951 in Mexico when Burroughs killed his wife, the former Joan Vollmer, in the blurry haze of gin and a William Tell prank with a pistol. Grauerholz long tended to Burroughs’ wounded consciousness, which the writer eventually identified as the invasion of an evil spirit. The guilt ever haunted his life and his work.
A few weeks after Burroughs died, Grauerholz and friends sent him off in a non-secular ritual, a Tibetan-inspired bardo, meant to guide the soul’s transition to eternity. They filled an eight-foot-tall metal cage with artifacts, images of Burroughs, candles and fireworks and set the whole thing ablaze. Music ensued in a nearby barn, and the actor Gary Sinise phoned in from afar with a few words of creative solidarity.
Over the years I wrote about Burroughs and his books at least a half a dozen times. One of my last interactions with Grauerholz was probably in 2010 when a young filmmaker, Yony Leyser, was launching a documentary on the festival circuit — “Wiliam S. Burroughs: A Man Within.” Grauerholz pronounced it surprisingly good and was grateful that the tone and content of the film were accurate.
There was much I didn’t know about Grauerholz’s existence or about what it meant to devote one’s life to a person and a cause beyond oneself. Oliver Harris provides a hint in his tribute, which draws from their nearly four-decade acquaintance and professional relations: “But there were times while Burroughs was alive and, in the years after his death, when James regretted what that cost him, what was left undone in his own name. James will not be remembered for his music or his writing. But he will be remembered, and rightly so, with love.”
TWO THINGS
Terry Tempest Williams is the kind of person who’d collect a jar of river water near her Utah desert home and send it as an amulet to a friend dying of cancer. She’s the kind of writer whose heart is always on the page as she aches for the planet, for justice, and for the goodness of human connections. As a writer in residence at Harvard’s Divinity School for nearly a decade, her seminar on Finding Beauty in a Broken World is indicative of her legacy as an author and teacher. “The Glorians: Visitations From the Holy Ordinary,” her new memoir in fragmented essays, begins in the void of the COVID lockdown, extends through unsettling controversies at Harvard, including the removal of a historic campus tree, and courses through personal losses, anxieties and healing insights. What are the “glorians”? The idea came to her in a dream, emanating from the realization that faith need not depend on a deity — one can experience enlightenment, grace and the exaltation of the “Holy Ordinary” in the work of ants or the whirling of the dust-flecked cosmos. Williams has been tapped to give the keynote talk April 17 at the always energizing Unbound Book Festival in Columbia, Missouri. unboundbookfestival.com
In these parts, all that most of us with jazz ears need to hear is two words: Pat Metheny. The native son and guitar god returns home for a night at the Kauffman Center. He’s currently embarked on a global tour, riding the wave of the latest entry in his “Side-Eye” series, which features a changing lineup of young musicians learning to think well and play brilliantly under his guidance. 7:30 p.m., April 4, Muriel Kauffman Theater; kauffmancenter.org.
