The Real Life of Anthony Burgess - Hardcover

Biswell, Andrew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0330481703 ISBN 13: 9780330481700

Publisher: Picador, 2005

Synopsis

Anthony Burgess has always attracted acclaim and notoriety in roughly equal measure. Admired worldwide for his literary novels -- including Earthly Powers and the Enderby quartet -- he is known to a wider audience as the author of the ultra-violent shocker, A Clockwork Orange. Burgess was a brilliant polymath who for many years regarded himself as a composer rather than a writer. This book looks his solitary childhood, his haphazard education, his anti-heroic army career, his gloomy post-war provincial teaching, and his colourful travels to such diverse places as Malaya, Rome and Leningrad. Burgess's was a unique creativity that engendered complicated relationships with his friends, his publishers, his first wife, his lovers, and other writers such as Graham Greene and William Burroughs. Drawing on extensive interviews, unpublished writings, manuscripts, letters and diaries, The Real Life of Anthony Burgess reveals both the professional writer and the private man as he has never been seen before.

About this title

Review:

A solid and timely reminder of the good and the great things about Burgess -- Sunday Times

[it] is a work of scholarship, understanding and sympathetic portraiture. -- Observer

Book Description:

The first comprehensive life of this major writer and extraordinary man.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0330481703
• ISBN 13: 9780330481700
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 400