A Clockwork Orange (Author Biography)

Author Biography

John Anthony Burgess Wilson was born in 1917 in Manchester, England, to Joseph, a cashier and pub pianist, and Elizabeth (Burgess) Wilson. His mother and sister died of the flu in 1919, and Burgess was raised by a maternal aunt, and later by his stepmother. He studied in England at Xaverian College and Manchester University, from where he graduated in 1940 with a degree in English language and literature, though his chief passion was music. After serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War II, Burgess pursued a career in education, teaching at Birmingham University and Banbury Grammar School and working for the Ministry of Education.

In 1959, while an education officer in Brunei, Borneo, doctors diagnosed Burgess with a cerebral tumor, giving him a year to live. It was then he began writing in earnest, steadily turning out novels, columns, and reviews. He dropped his first and last names because he felt it was inappropriate for a member of the British Colonial Service to publish under his own name. Burgess did not die within the year, and continued writing at a torrid pace, churning out eleven novels between 1960 and 1964 alone.

In 1962 Burgess's novel A Clockwork Orange was published, a satirical work detailing the violent exploits of a futuristic teenage gang and its Beethoven-loving leader, Alex. The novel satirizes psychologist B. F. Skinner's theories of human behavior and the welfare state. Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of the novel into a feature film in 1971 won Burgess numerous new readers and secured the novel's reputation as one of the most controversial in English literature. Unfortunately for Burgess, because he was financially strapped, he had sold the film rights to A Clock-work Orange for just $500 (U.S.) and received less than $3,000 (U.S.) in payments after the film's release.

Burgess edited and published numerous books after A Clockwork Orange including novels, screenplays, autobiographies, critical studies, documentaries, and an opera. None of them ever achieved the degree of notoriety that A Clockwork Orange received. These works include The Novel Today (1963); The Eve of Saint Venus (1964); Language Made Plain (1964); Here Comes Everybody: A Study of James Joyce's Fiction (1965); Tremor of Intent (1966); The Novel Now (1967); Earthly Powers (1980), winner of the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger in 1981; Enderby's Dark Lady (1984); and his autobiography Little Wilson and Big God (1986). Burgess's last novel, Byrne: A Novel, written in ottava rima (a stanza of eight lines of heroic verse with a rhyme scheme of abababcc), was published posthumously in 1995.

Almost all of Burgess's novels explore the conflicts between good and evil, the spirit and the flesh. Born a Catholic in Protestant England, Burgess believed that although people are born depraved, they retain the capacity to choose, and it is this capacity that makes human beings human. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Burgess died of cancer in London, England, in 1993.