Anthony Burgess
1 book analyzed
Biography
Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) was a polymath — novelist, composer, linguist, critic, and librettist who published over thirty novels and composed hundreds of musical works. Born John Burgess Wilson in Manchester, he was raised Catholic in a Protestant country, an outsider status that informed his lifelong preoccupation with moral choice and institutional authority. He served in the British Army during WWII, taught in colonial Malaya and Brunei, and was falsely diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1959 — told he had a year to live, he wrote five novels in that year to provide for his wife. He lived another thirty-four years. The traumatic event that most directly connects to A Clockwork Orange occurred during WWII: Burgess's first wife, Lynne, was assaulted by a group of American GI deserters in a London blackout, an attack that may have contributed to her later miscarriage and alcoholism. The home invasion at F. Alexander's house echoes this event with an explicitness Burgess acknowledged.