In chapter three of his second novel, Kentucky Ham, Burroughs relates his memory of the day his mother was shot dead, as well as the subsequent reunion with his father after he was freed from a Mexico City prison.

After Burroughs' lover, Ian Sommerville, convinced William that his son was irrevocably homesick, Billy returned to Palm Beach.

According to Kentucky Ham, Billy thought his friend was dead and ran away from home to seek refuge in a girlfriend's family fallout shelter.

Still, this act did not go unnoticed in the exclusive Palm Beach community, and the story of the manner in which his mother had perished at the hands of his father again gained wide circulation[clarification needed].

Bill then attended Green Valley, an alternative school based on the principles of English educator A. S. Neill, in Orange City, Florida, from 1965 to 1966.

Living in a wealthy section of Palm Beach, Billy Burroughs began to spend more time out of his grandparents' care and beyond the reach of local authorities.

Nevertheless, his second novel begins with his condemnation to a four-year suspended sentence and required admission to the Federal Narcotics Farm at Lexington in Kentucky.

After being released on parole in 1968, he quit his addiction to amphetamines and returned to The Green Valley School, a private institution run by Reverend Von Hilsheimer in Orange City, Florida.

The Green Valley School was where Burroughs met his future wife, a 17-year-old Jewish girl from Savannah, Georgia, named Karen Perry, who came from a privileged background.

Shortly after, Burroughs was found lying chilled, drunk, and exhausted in a shallow ditch at the side of a DeLand, Florida, highway on March 2.

The novels relate the experiences of a teenage runaway in the early 1960s, and are comparable in style and content to both Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and his father's Junkie.

Some time after the death of Burroughs Jr., his father invited David Ohle to edit the manuscript of his late son's unfinished novel Prakriti Junction.