Bookatlas
1917–1993Western Europe
Portrait of Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess

England

Dense, linguistically inventive prose, often narrated in invented slang, that forces the reader to learn a new language before trusting the story.

Burgess spent his thirties as a colonial education officer in Malaya and Brunei before collapsing in 1959 and being told, mistakenly, that he had a brain tumor and a year left to live; he spent that supposed final year writing furiously to leave his wife an income, producing several novels almost at once and discovering he could sustain the pace indefinitely once the diagnosis proved wrong.

A Clockwork Orange invented Nadsat, a teenage slang fusing Russian and English cockney, to narrate a young thug's ultraviolence and forced rehabilitation from the inside: a formal gamble that became his best-known and most filmed book, adapted by Stanley Kubrick in 1971 over Burgess's own mixed feelings about the result. He wrote dozens more novels, plus criticism, screenplays, and musical compositions, remaining restlessly prolific until his death in 1993.

The British Midcentury Novel

Their books in the atlas

  1. 1962
    Cover of A Clockwork Orange
    A Clockwork Orange
    Lvl 7dystopian
  2. 1980
    Cover of Earthly Powers
    Earthly Powers
    Lvl 7historical fiction

Meanwhile, elsewhere

Portrait of Bohumil Hrabal1914–1997Bohumil HrabalCzechiaRussia & Eastern Europe · CzechiaPortrait of Magda Szabó1917–2007Magda SzabóHungaryRussia & Eastern Europe · HungaryPortrait of Ralph Ellison1913–1994Ralph EllisonUSANorth America · USAPortrait of Saul Bellow1915–2005Saul BellowCanada / USANorth America · Canada / USAPortrait of Eudora Welty1909–2001Eudora WeltyUnited StatesNorth America · United StatesPortrait of Robertson Davies1913–1995Robertson DaviesCanadaNorth America · Canada

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