BIOGRAPHY & WORKS
ANTHONY BURGUESS

* Anthony Burgess, b. Feb. 25, 1917, d. Nov. 25, 1993, who also published as John Burgess Wilson and as Joseph Kell, was a versatile essayist, linguist, translator, musician, and comic novelist whose inventive use of language and taste for parody reflected his interest in James Joyce, about whom he wrote in Re Joyce (1965). He is perhaps best known for his futuristic novel A Clockwork Orange (1962; film, 1971). Raised a Roman Catholic in Manchester, England, he was trained as a composer and frequently used musical forms in his fiction, such as Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (1974). After serving in the British Army in World War II, he became a teacher and education officer, first in England (1950-54) and then in the Far East (1954-59), the setting of Time for a Tiger (1956), his first published novel. Sent back to England with a supposedly fatal brain tumor, he wrote five books in a year. His many other books include such novels as The Right to an Answer (1960), Enderby Outside (1968), and MF (1971); fictional (Nothing Like the Sun, 1964) and factual (Shakespeare, 1970) biographies of Shakespeare; variations on the Oedipus legend; and critical studies of literature, such as Flame into Being: The Life and Work of D. H. Lawrence (1985). The first volume of his autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God, was published in 1987.  Robert Murray Davis Bibliography: Coale, Samuel, Anthony Burgess (1981); Mathews, Richard, The Clockwork Universe of Anthony Burgess (1978).