Burgess, Anthony ( John Anthony Burgess Wilson) (1917–94), novelist, born in Manchester of a Catholic family, and educated at the University of Manchester. His varied early career included some years (1954–60) in the colonial service in Malaya and Borneo. During this time he wrote his first three novels, set in the Far East:
Time for a Tiger (1956),
The Enemy in the Blanket (1958), and
Beds in the East (1959; published together as
The Malayan Trilogy in 1972).
A Clockwork Orange (1962), an alarming vision of violence, high technology, and authoritarianism, appeared in a film version by Stanley Kubrick in 1971. His comic trilogy about the gross and fitfully inspired poet Enderby (
Inside Mr Enderby, 1963, under the pseudonym ‘Joseph Kell’;
Enderby Outside, 1968;
The Clockwork Testament, 1974) displays a fine flair for pastiche, satiric social comment, and verbal invention.
Earthly Powers (1980) is a long and ambitious first-person novel, narrated by a successful octogenarian homosexual writer, Kenneth Toomey, in which real and fictitious characters mingle to produce an international panorama of the 20th cent. Other works include
Enderby's Dark Lady (1984),
The Kingdom of the Wicked (1985),
The Devil's Mode (stories, 1989), and
A Dead Man in Deptford (1993), a brilliant recreation of the life of Christopher
Marlowe. Two volumes of memoirs,
Little Wilson and Big God and
You've Had Your Time, appeared in 1987 and 1990.
Burgess also wrote critical works, notably on
Joyce; composed orchestral works; written film and television scripts, innumerable reviews (see
Homage to Qwertyuiop, 1987), and a biography of Shakespeare (1970).