The dystopian writings of George Orwell ( Nineteen Eighty-Four), Aldous Huxley ( Brave New World Revisited), Diana and Meir Gillon ( The Unsleep) and Yevgeny Zamyatin ( We) all provide literary context for A Clockwork Orange. A similar attack happens in the novel, when a writer’s wife is beaten and raped by Alex and his droogs.ĭespite this, much of Burgess’s inspiration for the novel lay in literature. During the wartime blackout of 1944 London, Lynne was beaten up and robbed by a gang of American soldiers. He claimed that the kernel for Alex’s brutal behaviour lay in an attack suffered by his first wife Llewela (Lynne) Jones. This violence, so brutally rendered in the novel, could have been inspired by an incident from Burgess’s own experience. Burgess was interested by this emergence of a world that had not existed in his own youth, and he anticipated the arrival of Mods and Rockers when he presented Alex and his droogs as a gang with a tribal fashion sense and a predilection for motiveless violence.

A new youth culture was beginning to appear, with pop music, milk bars, drugs and Teddy Boy violence. He returned to England from colonial teaching posts in Malaya and Brunei in 1959 and noticed that England had changed while he had been abroad. A Clockwork Orange continued to tick away in Burgess’s imagination until the end of his life.īurgess began writing the novel in early 1961. Yet he never stopped writing about the book, giving interviews about it, defending it, sometimes disowning it. Later on, Burgess sought to distance himself from Kubrick’s ‘highly coloured and explicit’ film and expressed frustration that he would be remembered for this ‘very minor work’, when there were other novels that he valued more highly. Yet A Clockwork Orange did not reach a mass audience until Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation was released in January 1972.

With its prophetic mixture of drugs, music, fashion and juvenile violence, Burgess’s novel developed a countercultural following in the 1960s.

It draws on the collections of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, delving into the archives and harnessing different media to tell the story of the novel and its legacy. This resource aims to explore the relevance of A Clockwork Orange, and present valuable information from the archive to anyone interested in learning more about the text. The linguistic originality of the book, and the moral questions it raises, are as relevant now as they ever were. The novel is concerned with the conflict between the individual and the state, the punishment of young criminals, and the possibility or otherwise of redemption.

‘What’s it going to be then, eh?’ - Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962).Ī Clockwork Orange is Anthony Burgess’s most famous novel and its impact on literary, musical and visual culture has been extensive.

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