Anthony Burgess Biography

Anthony Burgess was born John Anthony Burgess Wilson in a small house in England on February 25, 1917. His father was a bookkeeper and a part-time pianist, and his mother was a musician/dancer that his father met at the Ardwick Empire.

When he was a baby he was found lying in his cot with his mother and sister dead beside him, both victims of the Spanish flu.

Burgess went to the Bishop Bilsborrow Primary School, Moss Side, Xavarian College, and Manchester University. He spent six years as a war time soldier afterwards. He then went on to education, becoming education officer in Malaya and Brunei.

Soon after, he was diagnosed with a terminal illness, and expected to die within a year. He stayed at home, becoming a professional writer in hopes of providing some security for his wife. The diagnosis proved to be wrong, and Burgess continued on in his writing career. Although he wrote over thirty novels, sixteen works of nonfiction, some poetry and plays, and countless musical compositions, he is best known for his eighth novel, A Clockwork Orange.

Published in 1962, A Clockwork Orange is a futuristic novel where teens roam the streets at night robbing and raping and killing. When it was first printed in America, the twenty-first and final chapter was left out. This last chapter showed Alex, the protagonist, renouncing his life of crime and desiring to settle down. The Stanley Kubrick film based on the novel was based on the American version. Burgess has said that the "American or Kubrickian Orange is a fable; the British or world one is a novel." A novel, Burgess ays, shows the character changing his ways throughout the book.

Burgess used "nadsat," a Russified version of English, with a healthy dose of Cockney English and invented slang to make the book a "linguistic adventure." But "people preferred the film because they were scared, rightly, of language."

Burgess died in 1993

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