It’s the birthday of English novelist, critic, and composer Anthony Burgess (1917-1993), best known for his dystopian novel about violence in a conformist society, A Clockwork Orange (1962)—a work that he felt was an outlier and not his most worthy.

Burgess was born in Manchester, England; his mother died of Spanish flu when he was a baby, and his father resented and ignored him after that. Burgess studied at Manchester University (1940), then served in the British Army Education Corps as musical director of a special services unit. (So I’m guessing not a lot of combat.) He went on to teach phonetics at Birmingham University and English at a grammar school, and to work in Malaya and Borneo as an education officer from 1954 to 1959.

By then Burgess was writing novels. His first three novels comprised a Malayan trilogy: Time for a Tiger (1956), The Enemy in the Blanket (1958), and Beds in the East (1959). In 1959, Burgess was told he had a brain tumor and a year to live, so he wrote four novels in one year, like you do, and they were all published. (My children are home from school, this time due to the high winds, so heck, I’ll probably finish my current novel today and write at least one more.) Burgess was in fact insanely prolific and published a couple of novels under the name Joseph Kell (One Hand Clapping, 1961; Inside Mr. Enderby, 1963) so people wouldn’t think he was a hack. As it happened, he didn’t actually have a brain tumor, later calling the misdiagnosis “political.”

Burgess went on to write a total of more than 30 novels and 250 musical compositions and at least once wrote a review of his own novel, which of course is a Big Fat No-No. He thought the Yorkshire Post had sent him his own book, Inside Mr. Enderby, as a joke, so he wrote a bad review of it, but the Yorkshire Post didn’t find it funny and fired him, prompting Gore Vidal to say, “At least, he is the first novelist in England to know that a reviewer has actually read the book under review.” *Burn.*

A Clockwork Orange was inspired in part by the brutal attack during WWII of Burgess’ first wife by American soldiers who had deserted; his wife then miscarried, possibly because of the attack. (This wife died of liver failure in 1968, and Burgess married a woman with whom he’d had an affair and a child.) A Clockwork Orange was adapted for film by Stanley Kubrick in 1971, and its violence unleashed a torrent of controversy, including claims that it inspired copycat crimes. Kubrick himself banned the film from Britain two years later, and it wasn’t until the year after Kubrick’s death in 1999 that the film was shown again in Britain. (I haven’t seen the film, but I gather it’s one of those films you can’t unsee, no matter how badly you want to.)

Burgess once said in an interview, “The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, color-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read.”

Have a safe Monday in a warm sheltered place and stay scrupulously honest to the data.