From music and film to art and literature, few artists have been so darkly influential as William Burroughs, whose low-life tales of sex, drugs and urban sleaze might well qualify him as America’s most important writer of the 20th century.

In advance of the centenary of his birth in St Louis, Miles’ extensive biography is the first full-length affair to be published since Ted Morgan’s 1988 tome Literary Outlaw (which Burroughs hated), and also the first to chronicle the last decade of the junkie genius’ eventful life.

From the accidental shooting of his wife in Mexico City in 1951 to the shooting-up of heroin in countless other locations, Miles’ book forensically chronicles Burroughs’ world of habitual criminality, weird sex, hard drugs, literary feuds, celebrity encounters and, of course, hard artistic graft.