Anthony Burgess was an English writer whose reputation rests almost exclusively on his best-known (and his least favorite) work, the novel A Clockwork Orange. The 1962 dystopian novel stirred up controversy with its ultra-violent content narrated largely through a Russian-influenced slang of Burgess's invention, "nadsat." The 1971 film version by Stanley Kubrick provoked enough "copycat" crimes - a great irony, considering both the book and film decry unconscious, deterministic acts, yet tolerate evil so long as it is willfully chosen - that Kubrick banned the showing of it in the United Kingdom in 1973.
Burgess's work goes far beyond A Clockwork Orange. Born John Anthony Burgess Wilson...
