Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) was an English novelist and critic. He was also active as a composer, librettist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, journalist, essayist, travel writer, broadcaster, translator and educationalist. Born John Burgess Wilson in Manchester, England, he lived and worked variously in Southeast Asia, the United States and Mediterranean Europe. His fiction includes the Malayan trilogy (The Long Day Wanes) on the dying days of Britain's empire in the East, the Enderby cycle of comic novels about a reclusive poet and his muse, the classic story of Shakespeare's love-life Nothing Like the Sun, the cult exploration of the nature of evil A Clockwork Orange, and the panoramic Tolstoyan saga Earthly Powers. He wrote critical studies of Joyce, Hemingway, Shakespeare and Lawrence, produced the treatises on linguistics Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air, and turned out large quantities of journalism in various languages. He translated Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus the King and Carmen for theater, scripted Jesus of Nazareth and Moses the Lawgiver for the screen, and composed the Sinfoni Melayu, the Symphony (No. 3) in C, and the opera Blooms of Dublin.

Work methods

"I start at the beginning, go to the end, then stop," Burgess once said.

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He revealed in Martin Seymour-Smith's Novels and Novelists: A Guide to the World of Fiction (1980) that he would often prepare a synopsis with a name-list before beginning a project. But Seymour-Smith wrote: "Burgess believes overplanning is fatal to creativity and regards his unconscious mind and the act of writing itself as indispensable guides. He does not produce a draft of a whole novel which he then revises, but prefers to get one page finished before he goes on to the next, which involves a good deal of revision and correction."

Related Topics:
Martin Seymour-Smith - Unconscious mind

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His work routine from when he began writing until his death was to produce 1,000 words of fair copy per day, weekends included, 365 days a year. His favoured time for working was the afternoon, since "the unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon".

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