The primary and most controversial idea in A Clockwork Orange is voiced repeatedly by F.

Also, during this period, he wrote for the local newspaper, the Banbury Guardian.Buy Study Guide The necessity of free will for humanity He also worked as a secondary school teacher at Banbury Grammar School. He left the army in 1946 and spent the next four years teaching at Mid-West School of Education and Bamber Bridge Emergency Teacher Training College. As a result, she lost the child she was pregnant with at the time, and Burgess was denied leave to visit her. His wife was raped by American deserters during a blackout. In a terrifying incident, some scholars believed inspired events in A Clockwork Orange. He was unpopular among the ranks and even pursued by the military police for desertion. Around this period, he spent time as a Nursing Orderly in the Royal Army Medical Corps. In 1942, two years later, he married Llewela Isherwood Jones, whom he’d met at the university. He studied English literature instead and graduated with a BA in 1940. He intended to study music but was turned down due to poor grades. He later attended the Victora University of Manchester. He attended several schools throughout his youth before being accepted into Xaverian College. He was despised, he believed, by his father for having survived when his mother and sister didn’t. Throughout his childhood, Burgess described, he was a solitary child. After her passing, Burgess was primarily raised by his aunt, Ann. It purports to detail the Bard’s affair with a black prostitute who inspired the Dark Lady sonnets.īurgess’s mother died during the 1918 flu pandemic, as did his sister, Muriel. Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare’s Love Life is a fictional biography of William Shakespeare, published in 1964. There, they encounter Francis Xavier Enderby. The book uses science fiction and fantasy, as well as bringing reades into the future. Enderby was the first of a set of four comic novels. It addresses themes of overpopulation, religion, and the government. The Wanting Seed is a dystopian novel that was published in 1962. It’s often funny, outrageous, and strange. Earthly Powers tells the story of Kenneth Toomey’s life over the course of 82 chapters. It features Burgess’s famous Nadsat slang. It follows Alex, a teenage criminal, who is brainwashed into nonviolent behavior. Burgess remarried six months after his first wife’s death.Ī Clockwork Orange is Burgess’s best-known novel.He was friends with Joseph Heller, the author of Catch-22.He worked as a professor at Princeton for a time.Burgess spent time as a Nursing Orderly in the Royal Army Medical Corps.His mother died during the 1918 flu pandemic, as did his sister, Muriel.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess