Anthony Burgess

Abstract

John Anthony Burgess Wilson (b. 1917–d. 1993) was a prominent British-born novelist, composer, critic, essayist, journalist, playwright, poet, and librettist of the post–World War II period. His best-known work remains A Clockwork Orange (first published in 1962; see Burgess 2010 and Burgess 2012, cited under Critical Editions), a violent morality-tale novella that he later repeatedly disavowed. However, in the 21st century critics have also turned attention to other parts of his extensive output, identifying, in particular, his Malayan Trilogy (1956–1959) as an early example of postcolonial fiction written from the colonial perspective. His reputation also rests upon his longest novel, Earthly Powers, a satire of the airport blockbuster of the 1970s, and his novels about the Elizabethan playwrights William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, entitled Nothing like the Sun and A Dead Man in Deptford, respectively. He was the author of thirty-two novels, two verse novels, two children’s books, two volumes of autobiography, at least ten major translations, nine book-length literary studies, two studies of popular linguistics, a volume of short stories, multiple libretti, thousands of pieces of journalism, numerous film and TV scripts, and hundreds of pieces of original musical composition. Despite an upturn in critical attention toward his work, much of his nonfiction remains uncollected and many of his novels are currently out of print, though a critical edition of his collected fiction is under way. His major theme, according to both himself and his early critics, was the limitations of human free will. He derived this concept from his upbringing as a Lancastrian Catholic, an influence that shaped much of his thinking for the rest of his life and writing career. Many of his major works feature artists and writers as protagonists, indicating a fixation on aesthetics and the artistic process. Additionally, he often fictionalized the lives of historical personages, from Shakespeare to Napoleon to Jesus Christ. Critics have identified his fiction as particularly significant in relation to the boundary of colonial and postcolonial literature, and that between modernism and postmodernism.