Anthony Burgess | Britannica

Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess is a noted contributor to Encyclopaedia Britannica online. Read Britannica's biography of Anthony Burgess

BIOGRAPHY

Anthony Burgess (1917-93) was an English novelist, critic, and man of letters whose fictional explorations of modern dilemmas combine wit, moral earnestness, and a note of the bizarre.

His A Clockwork Orange (1962; filmed 1971) made his reputation as a novelist of comic and mordant power. Other novels include The Eve of Saint Venus (1964), Enderby Outside (1968), Earthly Powers (1980), The End of the World News (1983), The Kingdom of the Wicked (1985), Any Old Iron (1989), and A Dead Man in Deptford (1993). He also wrote a two-volume autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God: Being the First Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess (1987) and You've Had Your Time: Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess (1990).

Primary Contributions (1)

Novel

A novel is an invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that deals imaginatively with human experience, usually through a connected sequence of events involving a group of characters in a specific setting. Within its broad framework, the genre of the novel has…

Publications (4)

A Clockwork Orange (1986)

By Anthony Burgess

Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles.

A vicious fifteen-year-old droog is the central character of this 1963 classic. In Anthony Burgess's nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, who talks in a brutal invented slang that brilliantly renders his and his friends' social pathology. A Clockwork Orange is...

The End of the World News An Entertainment (1983)

By Anthony Burgess

Presented without chapter breaks, the plot weaves together three storylines. One follows Leon Trotsky on a journey to New York City shortly before the Russian Revolution of 1917. This story is written as the libretto of an Off-Broadway musical. A second tale covers the life and career of Sigmund Freud and includes portrayals of Havelock Ellis and Krafft-Ebing. The third part is set in the future, shortly before the impact of a rogue, extrasolar planet with the Earth. Because of the latter story line,...

EARTHLY POWERS (December 1980)

By Anthony burgess

"In Earthly Powers Burgess created his masterpiece. At its center are two twentieth-century men who represent different kinds of power--Kenneth Toomey, eminent novelist, a man who has outlived his contemporaries to survive into honored, bitter, luxurious old age as a celebrity of dubious notoriety; and Don Carlo Campanati, a man of God, eventually beloved Pope, who rises through the Vatican as a shrewd manipulator to become the architect of church revolution and a candidate for sainthood. Through...

The Eve of Saint Venus (1970)

By Anthony Burgess

THE EVE OF SAINT VENUS by Anthony Burgess, W.W. Norton, First American Edition, 1970. This is a Collectible Hardcover, X-LIBRARY Book. The Eve of Saint Venus is a feast, both delicate and substantial. It is a highly civilized joke in which the goddess Venus descends into the gray world of the welfare state, intervenes rather erotically in the wedding arrangements of a young couple, and - through her capacity as goddess of love - transcends her divine appetites and consecrates in music, poetry, and...

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