Anthony burgess 1917-1993

Anthony Burgess was a British novelist, critic and composer. He was also active as a librettist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, journalist, essayist, travel writer, broadcaster, translator, and educationalist.

Born in Manchester in northwest England, he lived and worked variously in Southeast Asia, the United States and Mediterranean Europe.

Burgess's fiction includes the Malayan trilogy (The Long Day Wanes) on the dying days of Britain's empire in the East, the Enderby quartet of comic novels about a reclusive poet and his muse, the classic speculative recreation of Shakespeare's love-life Nothing Like the Sun, the cult exploration of the nature of evil A Clockwork Orange, and his masterpiece Earthly Powers, a panoramic saga of the 20th century.

He wrote critical studies of Joyce, Hemingway, Shakespeare and Lawrence, produced the treatises on linguistics Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air, and was a prolific journalist, writing in several languages. The translator and adapter of Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus the King, and Carmen for the stage, he scripted Jesus of Nazareth and Moses the Lawgiver for the screen, invented the prehistoric language spoken in Quest for Fire, and composed the Sinfoni Melayu, the Symphony (No. 3) in C, and the opera Blooms of Dublin.

A product of these highly fertile years was his best-known work (or most notorious, after Stanley Kubrick made a motion picture adaptation), the dystopian tour de force A Clockwork Orange (1962). Inspired initially by an incident during World War II in which his wife Lynne was allegedly robbed and assaulted in London during the blackout by deserters from the U.S. Army (an event that may have contributed to a miscarriage she suffered), the book was an examination of free will and morality. The young anti-hero, Alex, captured after a career of violence and mayhem, is given aversion conditioning to stop his violence. It makes him defenseless against other people and unable to enjoy the music (especially Beethoven, and more specifically the Ninth Symphony) that, besides violence, had been an intense pleasure for him.

The novel is separated into three parts of seven chapters. Each part has a different setting or motive for the main character, but keeps to certain conventions across three parts. For example, each part begins with a character repeating the phrase "What's it going to be then, eh?" The number of chapters is relevant to Western Civilization's age of maturity, and as Burgess said in his introduction to later versions of the novel, "21 is the symbol of human maturity, or used to be, since at age 21 you got to vote and assumed adult responsibility. Whatever its symbology, the number 21 was the number I started out with...that number has to mean something in human terms when they handle it."

A Clockwork Orange is written in first person perspective from a seemingly biased and unreliable source. Alex never justifies his actions in the narration, giving a good sense that he is somewhat sincere; a narrator who, as unlikable as he may attempt to seem, evokes pity from the reader through the telling of his unending suffering and later through his realization that cycle will never end. Alex's perspective is effective in that the way that he describes events is easy to relate to even if the situations themselves are not. He uses words that are common in speech as well as Nadsat, the speech of the younger generation.