Anthony Burgess is generally known as the author of A Clockwork Orange, which was most famously adapted into a feature film of the same name directed by Stanley Kubrick.

Burgess was born in Manchester, England in 1917. His childhood was quite solitary, his mother and sister having both died during the 1918 flu pandemic. Burgess was raised a Catholic and exclusively attended Catholic schools and college, and this heavy religious experience seeped into his work like A Clockwork Orange, which weaves the themes of original sin and free will into the main character Alex’s ultraviolent escapades.

After serving in the Royal Army, Burgess taught English. In 1954, he moved with his wife to Malay, where during his free time he took up creative writing as a hobby. In 1956, at the age of 39, Burgess published his first novel Time for a Tiger. From there, his creative output was steady. Burgess also worked as a translator, being fluent in Malay, Russian, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Welsh. Being an awesome linguist brought him an offer to invent a prehistoric language for the actors to speak in the 1981 movie Quest for Fire.

In addition to being a polyglot and novelist, Burgess contributed literary criticism and published scholarly essays to esteemed publications, including an entry for “Novel, the” in the 1970 Encyclopædia Britannica.

Lastly, Burgess was a lifelong composer of symphonies and sonatas. He once said “I wish people would think of me as a musician who writes novels, instead of a novelist who writes music on the side.” His heroes were Beethoven, Wagner, Purcell, Debussy, et ali.

Despite his appreciation of music, Burgess had nothing but disdain for pop music, including the Beatles: