Anthony Burgess Biography Quotes 21 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Anthony Burgess, born John Anthony Burgess Wilson in 1917 in Manchester, England, grew up in a city of music halls, mills, and Catholic parishes that left a lasting imprint on his imagination. The influenza pandemic of 1918 claimed his mother and sister when he was a small child, and he was raised thereafter by his father and other relatives. From early on he cultivated twin devotions to language and music: he learned piano, composed juvenilia, and read voraciously. He attended Catholic schools, including Xaverian College in Manchester, and then read English at the University of Manchester. At university he continued to compose and to immerse himself in literature and linguistics, acquiring the habits of a scholar while training his ear for rhythm, dialect, and verbal play that would later distinguish his prose.

War Service and Early Career
During the Second World War, Burgess served in the British Army, much of it in educational capacities. In this period he married Llewela (Lynne) Isherwood Jones, whose quick intelligence and sharp wit fed his own and who remained a central presence in his early writing life. The privations and moral ambiguities of wartime, as well as a violent assault suffered by Lynne that resulted in a miscarriage, deepened Burgess's lifelong preoccupation with free will, evil, and the fragile veneer of civilization. After demobilization he returned to teaching in England. He wrote criticism, composed music, and began to draft fiction, training himself to treat writing as a rigorous daily labor.

Colonial Service in Malaya and Borneo
In the mid-1950s Burgess joined the Colonial Service as an education officer and spent several years in what was then Malaya and Borneo. The encounter with Malay, Chinese, and other languages, with the politics of decolonization, and with the texture of daily life in Southeast Asia provided material for his first major achievement in fiction, the Malayan Trilogy, Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket, and Beds in the East, later issued collectively as The Long Day Wanes. In 1959 he collapsed at his post and was told he likely had a brain tumor. Believing his time limited, he wrote at a ferocious pace to secure a financial future for Lynne. The diagnosis ultimately proved mistaken, but the habit of relentless productivity remained.

Breakthrough and A Clockwork Orange
Burgess's international reputation rests above all on A Clockwork Orange (1962), a short, explosive novel narrated by a teenaged delinquent in a demotic called Nadsat, built from Russian and English slang. The book's core drama, whether a state that abolishes evil by conditioning also abolishes moral choice, echoes Burgess's Catholic consciousness and his wartime reflections on freedom and responsibility. An American edition long omitted the novel's original final chapter, sharpening its bleakness and fueling debate. Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film adaptation, with Malcolm McDowell as Alex, made the story a cultural flashpoint. The notoriety brought Burgess global attention he sometimes found burdensome, as the novel threatened to overshadow a much broader and more ambitious body of work.

Prolific Novelist and Critic
Across five decades Burgess produced an astonishing range of novels, short fiction, and essays. The Enderby series, Inside Mr Enderby and its sequels, offered a comic study of the artist's vocation in the figure of a shy, stubborn poet. Nothing Like the Sun reimagined Shakespeare's life in a stylistically daring homage to Elizabethan language. Napoleon Symphony mirrored the architecture of Beethoven's Eroica in a fictional portrait of Napoleon, fusing Burgess's musical and narrative designs. Earthly Powers, often regarded as his late masterpiece, traced the life of a worldly novelist entangled with the Church and political power in the twentieth century. Other significant novels include The Kingdom of the Wicked, The Pianoplayers, Any Old Iron, and A Dead Man in Deptford, which returned near the end of his life to the charged milieu of Christopher Marlowe.

As a critic and man of letters he wrote with distinction on James Joyce, most notably in ReJoyce and later Joysprick, and published a concise biography of Shakespeare. His anthology Ninety-Nine Novels surveyed the modern canon with iconoclastic verve. He translated and adapted works for stage and screen, including a celebrated English version of Cyrano de Bergerac, and he occasionally returned to A Clockwork Orange in stage incarnations to assert the moral contours of the original text.

Composer and Linguist
Music was not a sideline but a parallel vocation. Burgess composed orchestral and chamber pieces, songs, and incidental music, and reflected on the art in This Man and Music. His radio opera The Blooms of Dublin paid tribute to Joyce and the city that nurtured him. He approached language itself with a composer's ear, a gift that underwrote the polyphony of his fiction. Fluent in several languages and conversant with many more, he drew on Malay, Italian, and Russian in building idioms for his characters, and he explained linguistic playfulness to general audiences with unusual clarity and charm.

Life Abroad, Family, and Collaborators
After the 1960s Burgess lived much of his life outside Britain, spending time in Malta, Italy, and eventually Monaco, while holding visiting posts in the United States and lecturing widely. The moves reflected both practical concerns and his relish for cosmopolitan life. Following Lynne's death in 1968, he married the Italian translator and literary figure Liliana (Liana) Macellari. Their son, Paolo Andrea (often known as Andrew), grew up amid his father's library and manuscript scores. Liana, a formidable presence in her own right, managed aspects of his career and helped organize his archives, ensuring that the collected traces of his life as novelist, critic, and composer would be preserved. Friends and peers in the literary world, some admiring, some embattled by his outspoken opinions, recognized in him a singular energy and a daunting erudition.

Style, Belief, and Public Voice
Burgess's writing is anchored by questions of moral choice, the burdens of history, and the persistent tug of faith. Though often calling himself a lapsed Catholic, he returned repeatedly to sacramental imagery and to the drama of sin and grace, most explicitly in Earthly Powers but also in the antic comedy of Enderby and the apocalyptic satire of A Clockwork Orange. His prose sings with puns, neologisms, and rhythmic cadence; he delighted in parody and pastiche, yet never entirely abandoned classical form. As a reviewer and essayist he was a tireless public intellectual, filing columns and long reviews for newspapers and journals, defending literature's difficulty while insisting on its pleasures.

Final Years and Legacy
Anthony Burgess died in London in 1993, aged seventy-six, from lung cancer. By then he had published dozens of novels and volumes of criticism, two volumes of autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God and You've Had Your Time, and had composed a substantial corpus of music. He left behind a reputation complicated by the outsized fame of one novel but secured by the breadth of his achievement. Beyond the emblematic image of A Clockwork Orange's Alex stand a maker of intricate fictions, a committed teacher, a polyglot lover of words, and a composer who heard in language the same counterpoint he valued in music. His widow, Liana, and their son contributed to safeguarding his papers and scores, enabling later generations to encounter the full scope of his work. Burgess remains, in the view of many writers and readers, one of the twentieth century's most inventive and industrious men of letters from the United Kingdom, a figure whose curiosity crossed borders of nation, art, and genre with equal vigor.

Our collection contains 21 quotes who is written by Anthony, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Wisdom - Writing - Learning - Deep.

• What was Anthony Burgess IQ? Burgess claimed that his IQ was about 150.
• How did Anthony Burgess die? He died from lung cancer in 1993.
• What was Anthony Burgess first book? His first novel was 'Time for a Tiger' published in 1956.
• Anthony Burgess brain tumor: Burgess was falsely diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor in the early 1960s, but he did not have one.
• Was Anthony Burgess wife attacked? Yes, his first wife, Lynne, was assaulted in 1944.
• How many languages did Anthony Burgess speak? Burgess claimed to be fluent in 8 languages and an expert in 12.
• How old was Anthony Burgess? He became 76 years old

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