'John ('Jack') Burgess Wilson (February 25, 1917 – November 25, 1993), known by the pen-name Anthony Burgess, was a British novelist and critic. He was active as a composer, librettist, translator, journalist, broadcaster and screenwriter. Also publishing as John Burgess Wilson and Joseph Kell, Burgess wrote over 50 books covering a wide range of subject matter, including mainstream fiction such as the Enderby tetralogy (about a reclusive poet), dystopian science fiction such as A Clockwork Orange and The Wanting Seed, and the guides to James Joyce, Here Comes Everybody (aka Re Joyce) and Joysprick. He translated "Cyrano de Bergerac," "Oedipus the King" and "Carmen" for theater, and his television work included scripts for Jesus of Nazareth and Moses the Lawgiver.

Anthony Burgess was born in Harpurhey, a northeastern quarter of Manchester, Lancashire, England, to a Catholic family, and was left motherless at two years old by the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic ("Spanish flu"), which also took the life of his sister Muriel.

His mother, Elizabeth Burgess Wilson, had been a minor actress and dancer appearing at such theaters as the Manchester Ardwick Empire. His father, who died in 1948, was among other things a "bookie" (a person who takes bets, largely for horse-racing) and a pianist in movie theaters, accompanying the silent films of the era (see the novel The Pianoplayers). Burgess described him as "a mostly absent drunk who called himself a father".

Having some Scottish and Irish blood – it is not clear in what quantities – Burgess was raised by his maternal aunt, and later by his stepmother, in rooms above an "off-licence" (liquor store) and newspaper-tobacconist shop that his aunt ran, and above a "pub" (public house or bar).

Burgess was schooled at the Bishop Bilsborrow Memorial Roman Catholic Primary School in Moss Side, where good grades resulted in a place at the Catholic secondary school Xaverian College.

He entered the University of Manchester in 1937, graduating three years later with the degree of Bachelor of Arts, 2nd class honours, in English language and literature (he had originally wanted to study music, but his grades in physics – then a requirement for the subject – were deemed not high enough to qualify).

In 1940 Burgess began a six-year stint with the military, being conscripted into the British Army educational corps. He was stationed for a period in Gibraltar, a British naval base off the coast of Spain with an army garrison (see A Vision of Battlements), where he helped instruct the troops in "The British Way and Purpose" and organised a military dance band. He was also an instructor for the Central Advisory Council for Forces Education of the Ministry of Education.

In 1942, Burgess married the Welsh-born Llwela Isherwood Jones, known as Lynne. She had been a fellow student at Manchester University; their union was childless.

Leaving the army with the rank of sergeant-major in 1946, Burgess became a lecturer in speech and drama at the University of Birmingham.

He moved on from this to become a secondary school teacher of English literature on the staff of Banbury Grammar School in Oxfordshire (see The Worm and the Ring, which the then mayoress of Banbury claimed libeled her).

The years were to be looked back on as some of the happiest of Burgess's life. The couple lived in the picturesque village of Adderbury, where Burgess organised a number of amateur theatrical events in his spare time involving local people and students. The would-be writer was a habitué of the pubs of the village, where his predilection for consuming large quantities of cider was noted at the time.

In 1954 Burgess and his wife left for Malaya (now Malaysia), where he was a teacher and education officer in the British colonial service.

He was stationed initially in Kuala Kangsar in Perak, in what were then known as the Federated Malay States. Here he taught at the Malay College, dubbed "the Eton of the East".

In addition to his teaching duties at this school for the sons of leading Malayans, he had responsibilities as a "housemaster" in charge of junior students who were housed at the building formerly occupied by the British Resident in Perak. This edifice had gained notoriety during World War II as a place of torture, being the local headquarters of the Kempeitai (Japanese secret police).

As his novels and autobiography document, the late 1950s were the time of the communist insurgency, a period known as "the Malayan emergency" when planters and members of the British community – not to mention many Malays, Chinese and Tamils – were subject to frequent terrorist attack.

Following, but not necessarily consequent upon, a dispute with the Malay College's principal about accommodation for himself and his wife, he applied to be posted elsewhere – the couple occupied an apparently rather noisy apartment in the building mentioned above, where privacy was minimal. He was transferred to the Malay Teachers' Training College at Kota Bharu, Kelantan. This is located on the Siamese border; the Thais had ceded the area to the British in 1909 and a British adviser had been installed.

Burgess attained fluency in Malay, spoken and written. The language was then rendered in Arabic script. He spent much of his free time writing, "as a sort of gentlemanly hobby, because I knew there wasn't any money in it". He published his first novels, Time For A Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket and Beds in the East. These became known as "The Malayan Trilogy". During his time in the East he also wrote English Literature: A Survey for Students, and this book was in fact the first Burgess work published (if we do not count a essay published in the youth section of the London newspaper the Daily Express when Burgess was a child).

After a period of leave in Britain in 1959, he took up a further Eastern post, this time at the Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin College in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei, a coastal sultanate on the island of Borneo. Brunei had been a British protectorate since 1888, and was not to achieve independence until 1984. In Brunei Burgess sketched the novel that, when it was published in 1961, was to be entitled Devil of a State . Although the novel dealt with Brunei, for libel reasons the action had to be transposed to an imaginary East African country.

But before long Burgess had "collapsed" in a Brunei classroom. He is thought at this time to have been diagnosed as having an inoperable brain tumour, with the likelihood of only surviving a short time, occasioning the alleged breakdown. However, this is disputed. Some accounts have him suffering from the effects of prolonged heavy drinking (and associated poor nutrition), of the often oppressive Southeast Asian climate, and of overwork and professional disappointment. As he put it, the scions of the sultans and of the elite in Brunei "did not wish to be taught", because the free-flowing abundance of oil guaranteed their income and privileged status.

Describing the Brunei debacle to an interviewer over twenty years later, Burgess commented: "One day in the classroom I decided that I'd had enough and to let others take over. I just lay down on the floor out of interest to see what would happen." On another occasion he described it as "a willed collapse out of sheer boredom and frustration".

He was repatriated and spent some time in a London hospital (see The Doctor Is Sick). There he underwent cerebral tests which, as far as can be made out, proved negative.

On his discharge, benefitting from a sum of money Lynn had inherited from her father together with their savings built up over six years in the East, he found he had the financial independence to become a full-time writer.

The couple lived successively in an apartment in the town of Hove, near Brighton, on the Sussex coast (see the Enderby tetralogy); in a semi-detached house called "Applegarth" in the inland Sussex village of Etchingham, just down the road from the residence in Burwash once occupied by Rudyard Kipling; and in a terraced town house in Chiswick, a western inner suburb of London, conveniently located for the White City BBC television studios of which he was a frequent guest in this period.

A cruise holiday Burgess and his wife took to Russia, calling at St Petersburg (then Leningrad), resulted in Honey For the Bears and inspired some of the invented slang for A Clockwork Orange.

By the end of the 1960s Burgess was once again living outside England, as a tax exile. It was in grander accommodation this time; indeed, at his death he was a multi-millionaire and left a Europe-wide property portfolio of multiple houses and apartments, numbering in the double figures.

He lived in Malta for a time, but problems with the state censor prompted a move to Rome. The couple maintained a flat in the Italian capital and a country house in Bracciano.

Burgess lived for two years in the United States, working as a visiting professor at Princeton University and and as a "distinguished professor" at the City College of New York, and as writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Eventually he settled in Monaco, spending much of his time also at one of his houses in Lugano, Switzerland.

After Lynne's death in 1968 of liver cirrhosis (see Beard's Roman Women), he had remarried, to Liliana Macellari, an Italian translator, adopting the latter's son from a previous relationship. An attempt to kidnap the boy, called Paolo-Andrea, in Rome is believed to have been one of the factors deciding the family's move to Monaco.

A lifelong heavy smoker (up to 80 cigarettes, cigarillos or cheroots a day, by his own admission), Burgess returned to Twickenham, an outer suburb of London, England, where he owned a house, to die of lung cancer in 1993. His actual death occurred in a nearby hospice, and he is thought to have composed the novel Byrne on his deathbed.

It is thought he would have liked his ashes to be kept in Manchester, but they went to the cemetery in Monte Carlo. The epitaph on the memorial stone reads "Abba, Abba" - the Hebrew for "Father, father", i.e. God the Father, and the writer's initials forwards and backwards.

Sadly, Burgess's stepson Paolo-Andrea survived him by less than a decade.

Burgess kicked off his career with the Malayan trilogy (Time For A Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket and Beds in the East). Here he staked his claim to have written the definitive Malayan novel (i.e. novel of expatriate experience of Malaya) to set alongside Orwell's Burma (Burmese Days), Greene's Viet Nam (The Quiet American), and continuing in the tradition established by Kipling for India and Conrad and Maugham for Southeast Asia in general. Unlike Conrad, Maugham and Greene, who made no effort to learn local languages, but like Orwell (who had a good command of Urdu and Burmese, necessary for his work as a police officer) and Kipling (who spoke Hindi, having learnt it as a child), Burgess had excellent Malay, and this is reflected in the verisimilitude and interest in indigenous concerns that marks the Malayan trilogy.

His repatriate years (c. 1960-69) produced not just the Enderby cycle but the neglected The Right to an Answer, which touches on the theme of death and dying, and One Hand Clapping, partly a satire on the vacuity of popular culture.

A product of these highly fertile years was his best-known work (or most notorious, after Stanley Kubrick made a controversial film adaptation), the novel A Clockwork Orange (1962). Inspired initially by an incident during World War II in which his wife Lynn was allegedly raped in London during the blackout by US army deserters, the book was among many things an examination of free will and morality. The young anti-hero, Alex, captured after a career of violence and mayhem, is given aversion conditioning to stop his violence. It makes him defenceless against other people and unable to enjoy the music (especially Beethoven, and more especially the Ninth Symphony) that, besides violence, had been an intense pleasure for him.

By the 1970s his output had become highly experimental, and some critics see a falling-off in quality in this period. MF (1971) showed the influence of Levi-Strauss and the structuralists.

There was a return to form in the 1980s, when religious themes began to weigh heavy (see The Kingdom of the Wicked and Man of Nazareth as well as Earthly Powers).

Though Burgess lapsed from Catholicism early in his youth, the influence of the Catholic "training" and worldview remained strong in his work all his life – notably in the discussion of free will in A Clockwork Orange and in the apocalyptic vision of devastating changes in the Catholic Church due to what can be understood as Satanic influence in Earthly Powers (1980), which was written in the first instance as a parody of the blockbuster novel.

He won few honours in his own country - his masterpiece Earthly Powers, for example, famously failed to win the English "Booker" prize for fiction. He did better on the European continent, where he garnered the "Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres" distinction of France and became a Monagesque "Commandeur de Merite Culturel".

Burgess began his career as a critic with a highly regarded text for newcomers to the subject, English Literature, A Survey for Students, which is still used in many schools today. He followed this with The Novel Today and The Novel Now: A Student's Guide to Contemporary Fiction, and 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. His Encyclopedia Britannica entry The Novel, the for 1970 is generally considered to have been unsurpassed.

In addition to his Joyce studies and his Shorter Finnegan's Wake, Burgess has written full-length critical studies of William Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway and D.H. Lawrence. His 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 remains an invaluable guide.

Burgess was polyglot, with a command of Malay, Russian, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Welsh in addition to his native English, as well as some Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese, Swedish and Persian.

His interest in linguistics was reflected in the invented teen slang of A Clockwork Orange (called Nadsat) and in the film Quest for Fire (1981), for which he invented a prehistoric language for the characters to speak.

Burgess explores the field of linguistics in Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air.

Burgess produced journalism in American, Italian, French and British newspapers and magazines regularly – even compulsively – and in prodigious quantities. Martin Amis wrote in the London newspaper the Observer in 1987: "...on top of writing regularly for every known newspaper and magazine, Anthony Burgess writes regularly for every unknown one, too. Pick up a Hungarian quarterly or a Portuguese tabloid – and there is a Burgess, discoursing on goulash or test-driving the new Fiat 500."

As Burgess put it, in the way that others might enjoy yachting or golf, "I write music." He composed regularly throughout his life.

His works are infrequently performed today, but several of his pieces were broadcast during his lifetime on BBC Radio, including a musical based on James Joyce's Ulysses called The Blooms of Dublin (composed in 1982). He composed the music for the 1971 Minneapolis production of his Cyrano de Bergerac translation.

His Symphony (No. 3) in C was premiered by the University of Iowa orchestra in 1975. Many of his unpublished compositions are listed in This Man and Music.

Sinfoni Melayu, famously dismissed by the Burgess biographer Roger Lewis as "Elgar with bongo-bong drums", was described by Burgess, its composer, as an attempt to "combine the musical elements of the country into a synthetic language which called on native drums and xylophones".

The structure of the novel Napoleon Symphony (1974) was modelled on Beethoven's Eroica symphony.

Burgess made plain his low regard for the popular music that has emerged since the mid-1960s, yet he has been called "the godfather of punk" as a result of the nihilist atmosphere he created in A Clockwork Orange.

When Burgess was heard on the British Broadcasting Corporation’s 'Desert Island Discs' radio programme in 1966, he made the following choice: Purcell, 'Rejoice in the Lord Alway'; Bach, Goldberg Variations No 13; Elgar, Symphony No.1 in A flat major; Wagner, Walter's Trial Song from Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg; Debussy, Fêtes; Lambert, 'The Rio Grande'; Walton, Symphony No.1 in B flat; and Vaughan Williams, 'On Wenlock Edge'.

• Anthony Burgess had a long-term peeve of being confused with members of the Cambridge Five. This is partly because one of the members was called Guy Burgess, and another Anthony Blunt. Unfortunately, by the time they achieved notoriety, Anthony Burgess' pen name was well established.

• Burgess was among a select group of celebrity owners of the classic Bedford Dormobile (a campervan or motorhome of the Bedford marque, manufactured in England by Vauxhall Motors). He and his second wife spent, in the early years of their marriage, long periods on the road across western Europe, his wife driving while he wrote at a desk behind.

• One of Burgess's professors at Manchester University was A.J.P. Taylor. Marking one of Burgess's essays, the great historian wrote: 'Bright ideas insufficient to conceal lack of knowledge.'

• London's Daily Mail newspaper published in the 1960s a number of comically puritanical letters written by Burgess purporting to be from an Indian Muslim named "Mohammed Ali", who expressed his utter disgust at the degradation of contemporary western morals.

• Burgess was fired as literary critic for the English provincial newspaper the Yorkshire Post after a review he wrote of his own Inside Mr Enderby appeared in the newspaper. The novel had been published under the pseudonym Joseph Kell.

• Burgess claimed to have discovered the secret of controlling climax and prolonging pleasure during sexual congress. It was, he wrote, "a matter of reciting Milton only – 'High on a throne of royal state...' (Paradise Lost, Book Two)."

• After he was repatriated from Borneo in 1959 with a suspected cerebral tumour, Burgess was treated by the neurologist Sir Roger Bannister, who in his days as an athlete had been the first man to run a mile in less than four minutes.

• For a brief period during his studies of the Malay language and culture during the late 1950s, Burgess seriously considered becoming a Muslim. Explaining the allure of Islam in a 1969 interview with the University of Alabama scholar Geoffrey Aggeler, Burgess remarked: "You believe in one God. You say your prayers five times a day. You have a tremendous amount of freedom, sexual freedom; you can have four wives. The wife herself has a commensurate freedom. She can achieve divorce in the same way a man can."

• The Sheffield electropop band Heaven 17 named themselves after a pop group that appears in Burgess's 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange (though they dropped the "the").

• Burgess appears as a fictional character in A.S. Byatt's novel Babel Tower (1996) and in Paul Theroux's 'A. Burgess, Slightly Foxed: Fact and Fiction' (the New Yorker magazine, 1995)

• Time for a Tiger (1956)
• The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)
• Beds in the East (1959)
• The Right to an Answer (1960)
• The Doctor is Sick (1960)
• The Worm and the Ring (1960)
• Devil of a State (1961)
• One Hand Clapping (1961)
• A Clockwork Orange (1962) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadsat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadsat_lexicon
• The Wanting Seed (1962)
• Honey for the Bears (1963)
• Inside Mr. Enderby (1963)
• The Eve of St. Venus (1964)
• Nothing like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare's Love Life (1964)
• A Vision of Battlements (1965)
• Tremor of Intent (1966)
• Enderby Outside (1968)
• M/F (1971)
• Napoleon Symphony (1974)
• The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End (1974)
• A Long Trip to Tea Time (for children) (1976)
• Moses: A Narrative (1976)
• Beard's Roman Women (1976)
• Abba Abba (1977)
• 1985 (1978)
• Man of Nazareth (1979) (based on his screenplay for Jesus of Nazareth (movie) )
• The Land Where The Ice Cream Grows (for children) (1979)
• Earthly Powers (1980)
• The End of the World News: An Entertainment (1982)
• Enderby's Dark Lady, or No End of Enderby (1984)
• The Kingdom of the Wicked (1985)
• The Pianoplayers (1986)
• Blooms of Dublin (musical drama) (1986)
• A Clockwork Orange: A Play With Music (musical drama) (1987)
• Any Old Iron (1988)
• The Devil's Mode and Other Stories (1989) (short stories)
• Mozart and the Wolf Gang (1991)
• A Dead Man in Deptford (1993)
• Byrne (in verse) (1995)
• Revolutionary Sonnets (poetry) (2002)

• English Literature: A Survey for Students (1958)
• The Novel Today (1963)
• Language Made Plain (1964)
• Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader (1965) also published as Re Joyce
• The Coaching Days of England (1966)
• The Age of the Grand Tour (1966)
• The Novel Now: A Student's Guide to Contemporary Fiction (1967)
• Urgent Copy: Literary Studies (journalism) (1968)
• Novel, The (Encyclopedia Britannica essay) (1970)
• Shakespeare (1970)
• Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce (1973)
• Obscenity and the Arts (1973)
• New York (1976)
• Will and Testament (1977)
• A Christmas Recipe (1977)
• Ernest Hemingway and his World (1978)
• This Man and Music (1982)
• On Going To Bed (1982)
• Ninety-nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939 – A Personal Choice (1984)
• Flame Into Being: The Life and Work of D.H. Lawrence (1985)
• Homage to QWERT YUIOP (journalism) (1986)
• Little Wilson and Big God, Being the First Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess (Autobiography, Part 1) (1986)
• An Essay on Censorship (letter to Salman Rushdie in verse) (1989)
• You've Had Your Time, Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess (Autobiography, Part 2) (1990)
• On Mozart: A Paean for Wolfgang (1991)
• A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English (1992)
• One Man's Chorus: Uncollected Writings (journalism) (1998)

Roger Lewis's impressionistic and often penetrating tribute-cum-cacography Anthony Burgess: A Life was published in 2002.

Michael Ratcliffe has written an entry on Burgess for the New Dictionary of National Biography (2004).

There are many critical studies. The most recent addition, A Clockwork Counterpoint: The Music and Literature of Anthony Burgess, by Paul Phillips of Brown University, is due for publication before the end of 2005 by Manchester University Press.

Many of Burgess's literary and musical papers are archived at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Withington, Manchester, England. There are also items at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin and at the Anthony Burgess Center of the University of Angers in southwest France.

A junior professor at England's Manchester Metropolitan University named Andrew Biswell was thought in 1999 to have been commissioned by the publisher Picador to work on a fact-based biography – apparently with the cooperation of Burgess's widow Liliana. The title for what was facetiously described as "Biswell's Life of Burgess" was undecided but The Real Life of Anthony Burgess, The Fictionist and Inside Mr Burgess were believed to have been considered. The current status of the project is unclear.

• http://www.anthonyburgess.org/
• http://bu.univ-angers.fr/EXTRANET/AnthonyBURGESS/
• http://www.anthonyburgess.com/
• 1985 audio interview of Anthony Burgess, RealAudio
• http://town.hall.org/radio/HarperAudio/070494_harp_ITH.html
• http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0121256/
• http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/research/fa/burgess.hp.html