The real life of Anthony Burgess

Abstract

Anthony Burgess has always attracted acclaim and notoriety in roughly equal measure. He is admired for his literary novels, but known to a wider audience as the author of the ultra-violent shocker, A Clockwork Orange. Burgess was a brilliant polymath, a composer, and a man for whom chaos and creativity, fact and fiction, existed in a complex and unique balance. Drawing on his fraught relationships with publishers, friends and his first wife, as expressed in interviews, unpublished writings, letters and diaries, The Real Life of Anthony Burgess reveals both the professional writer and the private man as he has never been seen before.