Anthony Burgess

British · 1917 to 1993

Born John Anthony Burgess Wilson on February 25, 1917, in Harpurhey, a suburb of Manchester, to Irish Catholic parents, he was a year old when his mother and sister both died in the 1918 influenza pandemic. He believed his father, a piano-playing tobacconist, resented him for having survived. Largely solitary, he taught himself piano and read his way through Xaverian College and Manchester University, where he took a degree in English literature in 1940 after the music department turned him down. He served in the Army Educational Corps in Gibraltar during the war, married Lynne Jones in 1942, and spent the 1950s teaching school in Malaya and Brunei, where his first wife was attacked one night by four American sailors and miscarried their child. In 1959 a misdiagnosis of an inoperable brain tumour gave him, he later claimed, a single year to live; he sat down and wrote five novels in twelve months to leave Lynne a literary estate. The tumour never appeared. A Clockwork Orange (1962), narrated in the invented Nadsat slang by the teenage Alex, made him notorious after Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film. He disowned the book repeatedly and was irritated to be remembered for it above all else. Earthly Powers (1980), the 650-page confession of a homosexual Catholic novelist who opens with the line he had polished for decades, was shortlisted for the Booker. He published over thirty novels, two studies of Joyce, a Shakespeare biography, hundreds of reviews, translations of Cyrano and Carmen, and 250 musical compositions. He died of lung cancer in London on November 22, 1993, at seventy-six, his ashes inurned in Monaco under a marble stone reading Abba Abba.