A Clockwork Orange

A Clockwork Orange is a fiction 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess, and forms the basis for the 1971 film adaptation by Stanley Kubrick. The novel is widely regarded as a successor to earlier great fiction novels such as Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World and We.

Related Topics:
Fiction - 1962 - Novel - Anthony Burgess - 1971 film adaptation - Stanley Kubrick - Nineteen Eighty-Four - Brave New World - We

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It is one of Burgess's 'terminal novels', written to provide posthumous income for his wife after Burgess had allegedly been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour.

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Burgess wrote that the title came from an old Cockney expression "As queer as a clockwork orange" ¹ (Queer meaning Strange). Due to his time serving the British Colonial Office in Malaya, Burgess thought that the phrase could be used to punningly refer to a mechanically responsive (clockwork) non-human (orang, Malay for "person"). The Italian title, "Un'Arancia ad Orologeria" was interpreted to refer to a grenade. Burgess wrote in his later introduction, "A Clockwork Orange Resucked", that a creature who can only perform good or evil is "a clockwork orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil."

Related Topics:
Cockney - ¹ - Colonial Office - Malaya - Malay - God - Devil

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In his essay "Clockwork Oranges"² he says that "this title would be appropriate for a story about the application of Pavlovian, or mechanical, laws to an organism which, like a fruit, was capable of colour and sweetness". This title alludes to the protagonist's negatively conditioned responses to feelings of evil which prevent the exercise of his free will.

Related Topics:
² - Pavlovian

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The book was inspired by an event in 1944, when Burgess' pregnant wife Lynn was robbed and beaten by four U.S. GI deserters in a London street, suffering a miscarriage and chronic gynaecological problems³.

Related Topics:
1944 - U.S. GI deserters - London - Miscarriage - Gynaecological - ³

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