Ted Morgan Collection of William S. Burroughs Research, 1965-2013 | MS Manuscripts

Ted Morgan (March 30, 1932 - ) is a French-American biographer, journalist, and historian.  Born Comte St. Charles Armand Gabriel de Gramont in Geneva, Morgan attended Yale University and worked as a reporter. As a member of the French nobility, Morgan was drafted into the French Army where he served during the Algerian War from 1955 to 1957.

Following his military service, Morgan returned to the United States and won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting in 1961. At the time, Morgan was still a French citizen writing under the name of "Sanche de Gramont."  In 1977, Morgan renounced his titles of nobility and became an American citizen.

Morgan has written much-admired biographies of Winston Churchill, William S. Burroughs, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and W. Somerset Maugham.

William Seward Burroughs II (February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Burroughs began writing essays and journals in early adolescence. He left home in 1932 to attend Harvard University, studied English, and anthropology as a postgraduate, and later attended medical school in Vienna. After being turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and U.S. Navy in 1942 to serve in World War II, he dropped out and became afflicted with the drug addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, while working a variety of jobs. In 1943 while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the mutually influential foundation of what became the countercultural movement of the Beat Generation.

Much of Burroughs's work is semi-autobiographical, primarily drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict, as he lived throughout Mexico City, London, Paris, Berlin, the South American Amazon and Tangier in Morocco. Finding success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), Burroughs is perhaps best known for his third novel Naked Lunch (1959), a controversy-fraught work that underwent a court case under the U.S. sodomy laws. With Brion Gysin, he also popularized the literary cut-up technique in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961–64). In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.