Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess (1917-1993), British novelist and critic, best known for his controversial novel A Clockwork Orange (1962). Burgess was born in Manchester and was educated at the University of Manchester. He served in the army from 1940 to 1946 and then became a lecturer at Birmingham University. From 1948 to 1950 Burgess worked for the ministry of education. He was later appointed education officer in the Colonial Service and was based in Borneo and Malaya from 1954 to 1959. During his time abroad Burgess wrote his first three novels: Time for a Tiger (1956), The Enemy in the Blanker (1958), and Beds in the East (1959), published together as The Malayan Trilogy in 1972.

Burgess's novel A Clockwork Orange, set in a violent future in which gangs of adolescents terrorize society, earned him enormous publicity. For the characters in his book, he invented a language composed of a combination of words from English and American slang and the Russian language. The work gained a cult following after the release in 1971 of the motion-picture version by American director Stanley Kubrick. Burgess's prolific literary output during the 1960s and 1970s was characterized by skillful verbal inventiveness and pointed social satire. Two later novels, notable for their ambitiousness of scope, are Earthly Powers (1980) and Kingdom of the Wicked (1985). The latter explores the subject of the early church in the Roman Empire. Burgess’s last novel was A Dead Man in Deptford (1993), an interpretation of the life and death of 16th-century English playwright Christopher Marlowe.

Burgess's works of literary criticism include studies of Irish writer James Joyce and biographies of English writer D. H. Lawrence and American writer Ernest Hemingway. He also wrote two volumes of autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God (1987) and You've Had Your Time (1990). One Man’s Chorus (posthumously published, 1998) collects Burgess’s essays on a range of subjects, including the British government and his own writing.