Friday Focus: Focus on Author

Over the next four weeks, I’m going to be reading a novel for an English project, and you will get to read about it in several blog posts! Isn’t that great?

This blog gave me an excuse to read a book I’ve been wanting to read for a while, so, here it is, a blog about me reading A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (yes, the capital letters are necessary).

It was written by Antony Burgess in 1962, and the rest of this post will be all about him!

Anthony Burgess – A Mini-Biography

Anthony Burgess, 1968.

According to Britannica, Antony Burgess, originally named John Anthony Burgess Wilson, was born on February 25^th, 1917. He was born in Harpurhey, in Manchester, to Elizabeth Burgess and Joseph Wilson. His mother and his only sister both died of influenza when he was two years old, and his father married a publican in 1922. In 1928, when Burgess enrolled in secondary school, they lived in Moss Side. It was here that he wrote his first published short stories and poems.

The webpage of the International Antony Burgess Foundation tells that he graduated from Manchester College in 1940, with a degree in English Literature. Over the course of the next six years, he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps and the Army Educational Corps. 

In 1942, he married his first wife, Llewela (Lynne) Jones. After the second world war, he taught at several colleges, in Wolverhampton and Bamber Bridge, as well as teaching at Banbury Grammar School after he moved to Oxford. 

He completed his first full-length stage play in 1951, and wrote his two first novels around the same time, A Vision of Battlements and The Worm and the Ring. He and his wife moved to Malaya in 1954, before moving to Brunei. 

One day in 1959, Burgess suddenly collapsed. He was misdiagnosed with a fatal brain tumour. Over the next few years he published several novels, A Clockwork Orange being one of them. 1961 saw the start of his frequent contributions to television and radio programmes. 

In 1968, his first wife died of liver failure, and Burgess married his second wife that same year. They, along with her son, moved to Malta, and acquired various houses throughout Europe, before settling in Monaco in the middle of the 1970s.

Anthony Burgess wrote 33 novels throughout his life, along with 25 non-fiction works, and more than 200 musical works. He died in 1993, 76 years old.