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.

Trivia

• The novel was originally 'inspired' by an attack on Burgess's first wife Lynn, in blacked-out London, during the blitz. Four GI deserters are said to have attacked Lynn to rob her, beating her so that she miscarried and suffered lifelong dysmenorrhea. Contrary to legend, she was not raped.
• Alex's age at the end of the novel is the same age that the Burgesses' miscarried child would have been at the date of publication, had (s)he survived the attack on Lynn, been born and grown up.
• The allegedly Cockney phrase A Clockwork Orange is totally unknown to history: The first recorded use of it is Burgess's title. No-one is quite sure whether Burgess invented it, or whether he heard it personally from the inventor (possibly as a one-off utterance). His autobiography contains no record of where he first heard the phrase.
• Burgess claimed that he had typed the title A Clockwork Orange and then sat down to think of a story to go with it. One early idea apparently involved a strike or riot among apprentices under Elizabeth I.
• Since, in A Clockwork Orange, the author F Alexander wrote a book entitled 'A Clockwork Orange' and it is his wife who is attacked by the droogs, the novel supports a reading that Anthony Burgess is F Alexander.