Vollmer vs Burroughs:

She Sharpened Their Minds. Then They Forgot Her Name.

Before William S. Burroughs wrote anything significant, before Kerouac penned On the Road, before Ginsberg howled, Joan Vollmer was creating the space where it all happened. She was the intellectual engine. She challenged conventional thinking. She refused to live within the limits society set for women. She hosted, she provoked, she sharpened their minds. And Burroughs acknowledged it—in perhaps the most chilling way possible: "I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would have never become a writer but for Joan's death."