Real Life of Anthony Burgess

By Andrew Biswell
December 2005
Picador / Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 0330481703
434 pages, Illustrated, 6 ¼ x 9 ½”
$ 42.50 Hardcover

---

Anthony Burgess has always attracted acclaim and notoriety in roughly equal measure. Admired for the scope and inventiveness of his literary novels—including Earthly Powers and the Enderby Quartet—and known to a much wider audience as the author of the ultra-violent shocker A Clockwork Orange, he was also a brilliant polymath who for many years regarded himself as a composer rather than a writer.

This biography is the first to make sense of Burgess’ life and works in a comprehensive manner. It takes in the full range and variety of his writings and looks at his early influences, his chaotic sexual life and the repercussions—both literary and philosophical—of the loss of his Catholic faith.

Andrew Biswell has been researching and publishing articles on Burgess since 1995. He is a lecturer in the English department at Manchester University, and previously worked as a fiction critic for the Times Literary Supplement, Daily Telegraph, Guardian, and the Boston Globe.


Return to main page of Trans-Atlantic Publications