Trivia

After doctors found a cancerous tumor in his brain, he wrote "A Clockwork Orange" in a hurry, hoping that the money made from the book would support his wife after he died. He later found out that he did not have cancer.

Burgess' original screenplay for A Clockwork Orange (1971) was rejected by director Stanley Kubrick, who chose to write his own screenplay instead. Burgess' version is considered to be even more violent than his novel.

He wrote 33 novels, 25 works of non-fiction, two volumes of autobiography, three symphonies, and more than 250 other musical works, including a violin concerto for Yehudi Menuhin.

The attack of the writer's wife, in "Clockwork Orange", was based on an attack on his own wife by American GIs in London, whilst Burgess was stationed on Gibraltar.

In his novel "A Clockwork Orange", he coined the term "ultra-violence". The term now appears in some dictionaries.

He spoke six languages in addition to English.

Fired from his job at the Yorkshire Post after reviewing one of his own books (published under the name Joseph Kell). His review was negative but emphasized the book's sexual content: "This is in many ways a dirty book, and those of my readers with tender stomachs are advised to let it alone".

He graduated with a degree in English from the University of Manchester in 1940, and has been honored with a blue plaque there. As an undergraduate, he also composed music.

Wrote the English subtitles for the French-language version of Cyrano de Bergerac (1990).

He also published works under the pen name Joseph Kell.

Member of jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 1975

Father of Paolo Andrea Burgess (b. 1964).

His translation of Cyrano de Bergerac was first commissioned by Christopher Plummer, and is now considered to be the definitive English-language translation of the play. One alteration he made was the inclusion of a reference to Hamlet: Cyrano's list of insults to his nose climaxes with "Oh, that this too too solid nose would melt." This translation has been performed by Christopher Plummer, Kenneth Branagh, Kevin Kline and Derek Jacobi, all of whom have also played Hamlet. This version was also used for the English-language subtitles of the French film Cyrano de Bergerac (1990), which featured Gérard Depardieu, who also had a small part in Hamlet (1996).

He started work on scripts for TV mini-series about Atilla the Hun, Sigmund Freud, and Michelangelo Buonarroti; none were produced. He wrote a musical about Russian revolutionary Lev Trotskiy, which has never been performed, and a musical adaptation of James Joyce's novel "Ulysses". He wrote a movie script about Napoléon Bonaparte, which was to have been filmed by Kubrick.

Burgess was among the authors who worked on Stanley Kubrick's aborted epic about Napoléon Bonaparte in the 1970s. After Kubrick rejected his draft, Burgess reworked the material as his novel Napoleon Symphony (1974), but never spoke to Kubrick again, and became increasingly vocal about his dissatisfaction with Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971).

After Burgess interviewed fellow novelist Graham Greene, Greene said of the published article, "He put words into my mouth which I had to look up in the dictionary".

Son of Joseph Wilson and Elizabeth Burgess.

Various sources (including John Simon's review for New York Magazine) claim that Burgess did uncredited script work on the English version of Casanova (1976).