Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess was born on February 25, 1917 and died November 22, 1993. Anthony was famous for his extremely prolific writing career. He wrote an amazing amount of novels and was also a regular contributor to many different periodicals, from magazines to newspapers. He was born in Harpurhey, a northeastern suburb of Manchester. He was mainly self-taught, despite having a full school career. He has lived from Britain to America and even as far as what is now Malaysia, then just called Malaya. A Clockwork Orange is his best known work but many people agree that Earthly Powers is his best novel. When he died he lived in Monaco with his wife Liliana Macellari.
Anthony Burgess’ birth name was John Burgess Wilson, Anthony Burgess is a pen name. For the majority of his childhood he was raised by his father, his mother died of the flu when Anthony was only one year old. Anthony once described his father as, “a mostly absent drunk who called himself a father.” Anthony was raised a Catholic and, despite a brief renunciation of his faith, remained a Catholic for his whole life. He graduated from the Victoria University of Manchester with a Bachelor of Arts in English language and literature. He also had a brief stint in the British Military.
Burgess’ early career was as a teacher. At the end of 1950 he took a job as a secondary school teacher of English literature on the staff of Banbury Grammar School. Burgess and his wife, Llewela Jones, called Lynne, were known to consume large amounts of alcoholic cider and oftentimes caused a ruckus. Later he received a job in what was then called Malaya, and moved to Southeast Asia. He quickly became fluent in the native language and had been known to translate literature into Malay. During his residence in Malaya he wrote what is now known as the Mayalan Trilogy.
After living in Malaya Burgess moved back to Britain for a short while where he became friends with William S. Burroughs and was a regular on the BBC. After this brief stint in Britain he moved around from Rome to America and many places in between before finally settling in Monaco. It was during this period of moving around that his wife, lynne, died of liver cirrhosis, within five weeks he had been remarried to Liliana Macellari, with whom he had been having an affair with several years before lynne’s death. His move to Monaco was due in part to an attempted kidnapping of Burgess’ stepson. Anthony moved back to London in the early 1990’s where he died of lung cancer, likely caused by his lifelong smoking habit.
Anthony burgess was an amazing writer and linguist and had seen many of the defining moments of the modern world. He lived from 1917 to 1993 and wrote in inordinate amount. He is known for plays, screenplays, novels, symphonies, and articles, all of which were of high caliber. A Clockwork Orange is one of the most important science fiction novels of all time, let alone the 20th century. He was a man of many talents, a writer, teacher, and composer and was a true world traveler, living from America to Britain to Malaysia to Monaco. Anthony Burgess truly is one of the most important writers of the 20th century.