77 Facts About Anthony Burgess

John Anthony Burgess Wilson, who published under the name Anthony Burgess, was an English writer and composer.

In 1971, it was adapted into a controversial film by Stanley Kubrick, which Anthony Burgess said was chiefly responsible for the popularity of the book.

Anthony Burgess produced numerous other novels, including the Enderby quartet, and Earthly Powers.

Anthony Burgess wrote librettos and screenplays, including the 1977 television mini-series Jesus of Nazareth.

Anthony Burgess worked as a literary critic for several publications, including The Observer and The Guardian, and wrote studies of classic writers, notably James Joyce.

Anthony Burgess composed over 250 musical works; he considered himself as much a composer as an author, although he achieved considerably more success in writing.

In 1917, Anthony Burgess was born at 91 Carisbrook Street in Harpurhey, a suburb of Manchester, England, to Catholic parents, Joseph and Elizabeth Wilson.

Anthony Burgess described his background as lower middle class; growing up during the Great Depression, his parents, who were shopkeepers, were fairly well off, as the demand for their tobacco and alcohol wares remained constant.

Anthony Burgess was known in childhood as Jack, Little Jack, and Johnny Eagle.

Anthony Burgess began using the pen name Anthony Burgess upon the publication of his 1956 novel Time for a Tiger.

Anthony Burgess believed he was resented by his father, Joseph Wilson, for having survived, when his mother and sister did not.

Anthony Burgess was briefly employed at the tobacconist shop as a child.

Anthony Burgess was indifferent to music until he heard on his home-built radio "a quite incredible flute solo", which he characterised as "sinuous, exotic, erotic", and became spellbound.

Anthony Burgess had originally hoped to study music at university, but the music department at the Victoria University of Manchester turned down his application because of poor grades in physics.

Anthony Burgess met Llewela "Lynne" Isherwood Jones at the university where she was studying economics, politics and modern history, graduating in 1942 with an upper second-class.

Anthony Burgess was daughter of secondary school headmaster Edward Jones and Florence, and reportedly claimed to be a distant relative of Christopher Isherwood, although the Lewis and Biswell biographies dispute this.

Anthony Burgess spent six weeks in 1940 as a British Army recruit in Eskbank before becoming a Nursing Orderly Class 3 in the Royal Army Medical Corps.

In 1941, Anthony Burgess was pursued by the Royal Military Police for desertion after overstaying his leave from Morpeth military base with his future bride Lynne.

Anthony Burgess, stationed at the time in Gibraltar, was denied leave to see her.

Anthony Burgess played a key role in "The British Way and Purpose" programme, designed to introduce members of the forces to the peacetime socialism of the post-war years in Britain.

Anthony Burgess was an instructor for the Central Advisory Council for Forces Education of the Ministry of Education.

Anthony Burgess left the army in 1946 with the rank of sergeant-major.

Anthony Burgess taught in the extramural department of Birmingham University.

Anthony Burgess organised a number of amateur theatrical events in his spare time.

Anthony Burgess named the cottage "Little Gidding" after one of Eliot's Four Quartets.

Anthony Burgess cut his journalistic teeth in Adderbury, writing several articles for the local newspaper, the Banbury Guardian.

In 1954, Anthony Burgess joined the British Colonial Service as a teacher and education officer in Malaya, initially stationed at Kuala Kangsar in Perak.

Anthony Burgess attained fluency in Malay, spoken and written, achieving distinction in the examinations in the language set by the Colonial Office.

Anthony Burgess was rewarded with a salary increase for his proficiency in the language.

Anthony Burgess devoted some of his free time in Malaya to creative writing "as a sort of gentlemanly hobby, because I knew there wasn't any money in it," and published his first novels: Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket and Beds in the East.

About this time, Anthony Burgess collapsed in a Brunei classroom while teaching history and was diagnosed as having an inoperable brain tumour.

Anthony Burgess was given just a year to live, prompting him to write several novels to get money to provide for his widow.

Anthony Burgess gave a different account to Jeremy Isaacs in a Face to Face interview on the BBC The Late Show.

Anthony Burgess alluded to this in an interview with Don Swaim, explaining that his wife Lynne had said something "obscene" to the Duke of Edinburgh during an official visit, and the colonial authorities turned against him.

Anthony Burgess had already earned their displeasure, he told Swaim, by writing articles in the newspaper in support of the revolutionary opposition party the Parti Rakyat Brunei, and for his friendship with its leader Dr Azahari.

Anthony Burgess' biographers attribute the incident to the author's notorious mythomania.

Anthony Burgess was suffering from the effects of prolonged heavy drinking, of the often oppressive south-east Asian climate, of chronic constipation, and of overwork and professional disappointment.

Anthony Burgess was invalided home in 1959 and relieved of his position in Brunei.

Anthony Burgess spent some time in the neurological ward of a London hospital where he underwent cerebral tests that found no illness.

On discharge, benefiting from a sum of money which Lynne Anthony Burgess had inherited from her father, together with their savings built up over six years in the East, he decided to become a full-time writer.

Liana Macellari, an Italian translator twelve years younger than Anthony Burgess, came across his novels Inside Mr Enderby and A Clockwork Orange, while writing about English fiction.

Lynne Anthony Burgess died from cirrhosis of the liver, on 20 March 1968.

Six months later, in September 1968, Anthony Burgess married Liana, acknowledging her four-year-old boy as his own, although the birth certificate listed Roy Halliday, Liana's former partner, as the father.

Anthony Burgess was a Conservative a Catholic and monarchist, harbouring a distaste for all republics.

Anthony Burgess believed socialism for the most part was "ridiculous" but did "concede that socialised medicine is a priority in any civilised country today".

The negative reaction from a lecture that Anthony Burgess delivered to an audience of Catholic priests in Malta precipitated a move by the couple to Italy after the Maltese government confiscated the property.

On hearing rumours of a mafia plot to kidnap Paolo Andrea while the family was staying in Rome, Anthony Burgess decided to move to Monaco in 1975.

Anthony Burgess was motivated to move to the tax haven of Monaco, as the country did not levy income tax, and widows were exempt from death duties, a form of taxation on their husband's estates.

Anthony Burgess lived for two years in the United States, working as a visiting professor at Princeton University with the creative writing program and as a distinguished professor at the City College of New York.

Anthony Burgess went on to teach creative writing at Columbia University and was writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at the University at Buffalo.

Anthony Burgess lectured on the novel at the University of Iowa in 1975.

Anthony Burgess returned to Twickenham, an outer suburb of London, where he owned a house, to await death.

An accomplished musician, Anthony Burgess composed regularly throughout his life, and once said:.

Anthony Burgess described his Sinfoni Melayu as an attempt to "combine the musical elements of the country [Malaya] into a synthetic language which called on native drums and xylophones".

Anthony Burgess wrote a good deal of music for recorder as his son played the instrument.

Anthony Burgess produced a translation of Meilhac and Halevy's libretto to Bizet's Carmen, which was performed by the English National Opera, and wrote for the 1973 Broadway musical Cyrano, using his own adaptation of the original Rostand play as his basis.

Anthony Burgess created Blooms of Dublin in 1982, an operetta based on James Joyce's Ulysses and wrote a libretto for Weber's Oberon, performed by the Glasgow-based Scottish Opera.

Anthony Burgess worked on an anthology of the best of English literature translated into Malay, which failed to achieve publication.

Anthony Burgess's published translations include two versions of Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus the King and Carmen.

Anthony Burgess, who had lectured on phonetics at the University of Birmingham in the late 1940s, investigates the field of linguistics in Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air.

The story as seen on television made it clear that Anthony Burgess knew that these waitresses were not Malay.

Anthony Burgess operated more in the mode of Orwell, who had a good command of Urdu and Burmese and Kipling, who spoke Hindi.

Anthony Burgess added, "the film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me till I die".

Anthony Burgess had written A Clockwork Orange with 21 chapters, meaning to match the age of majority.

In 2021, The International Anthony Burgess Foundation premiered a webpage cataloging various stage productions of "A Clockwork Orange" from around the world.

In Martin Seymour-Smith's Novels and Novelists: A Guide to the World of Fiction, Anthony Burgess related that he would often prepare a synopsis with a name-list before beginning a project.

Anthony Burgess believes overplanning is fatal to creativity and regards his unconscious mind and the act of writing itself as indispensable guides.

In Napoleon Symphony, Anthony Burgess brought Bonaparte to life by shaping the novel's structure to Beethoven's Eroica symphony.

Anthony Burgess kept working through his final illness and was writing on his deathbed.

Anthony Burgess announced in a 1972 interview that he was writing a novel about the Black Prince which incorporated John Dos Passos's narrative techniques, although he never finished writing it.

Anthony Burgess wrote the Joyce studies Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader and Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce.

Anthony Burgess wrote the screenplays for Moses the Lawgiver, Jesus of Nazareth, and AD.

Anthony Burgess was co-writer of the script for the TV series Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson.

Anthony Burgess devised a Stone Age language for La Guerre du Feu.

Anthony Burgess's screenplay was rejected, although the huge submarine silo seen in the finished film was reportedly Burgess's inspiration.

The largest archive of Anthony Burgess's belongings is housed at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester, UK.

The International Anthony Burgess Foundation was established by Burgess's widow, Liana, in 2003.