Joan Vollmer Burroughs

Joan Vollmer
Vollmer, early 1940s
Born	(1923-02-04)February 4, 1923 Loudonville, New York, U.S.
Died	September 6, 1951(1951-09-06) (aged 28) Mexico City, Mexico
Nationality	American
Other names	Joan Vollmer Adams Joan Vollmer Burroughs
Education	St. Agnes School
Alma mater	Barnard College
Partner(s)	William S. Burroughs
Children	Julie Adams William S. Burroughs, Jr.

Joan Vollmer (February 4, 1923 – September 6, 1951) was the most prominent female member of the early Beat Generation circle. While a student at Barnard College, she became the roommate of Edie Parker (later married to Jack Kerouac). Their apartment became a gathering place for the Beats during the 1940s, where Vollmer was often at the center of marathon, all night discussions. In 1946, she began a relationship with William S. Burroughs, later becoming his common-law wife. In 1951, Burroughs killed Vollmer by shooting her in the head in what was apparently a drunken attempt at playing William Tell.

Joan Vollmer was born in Loudonville, an affluent suburb of Albany, New York, to an upper-middle-class family. She attended Barnard College in New York City in the early 1940s, and soon afterward married Paul Adams, a law student who was drafted during World War II, and therefore overseas during most of the early Beat years. Vollmer met Edie Parker at the West End Bar and the two moved in together in the first of a series of apartments in New York's Upper West Side that they shared with the writers, hustlers, alcoholics and drug addicts that later became known as the Beats. These included: William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, Herbert Huncke, Vickie Russell (a prostitute and addict who appears as "Mary" in Burroughs' novel Junkie), and Hal Chase, a Columbia University graduate student from Denver.