February 5 (1914): Birthday of William S. Burroughs, mentor to two of the most important figures of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Burroughs felt a special affinity towards both men as kindred fantasizers and encouraged their literary production.

Choose a sympathetic soul, and put their interests before yours for a while. How you mentor them is up to you of course. Burroughs, for example, taught Kerouac and Ginsberg, that, “In the U.S., you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.”

Filed under: Forebears