Anthony Burgess and America - by Christopher W Thurley (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book is a critical biography and literary cultural analysis of Burgess's interactions with the United States of America and American society, using newly discovered documents, archival research and Burgess's entire canon to investigate the profound influence of America on Burgess's life and work.

Book Synopsis

Anthony Burgess and America is a biographical and critical analysis of Burgess's commentary on and relationship with the United States of America.
Utilising Burgess's entire canon and newly discovered materials to assess Burgess's views on America, this book also evaluates the American inspirations in five Burgess novels. This essential addition to Burgess scholarship tells the story of a nearly unexplored area of Burgess's life. For the first time ever, Burgess's American experiences, work, and documented communication, lectures, interviews and public utterances are brought together to assess where these commentaries overlapped with his fiction.
The result is a complex personal and public history about one of Britain's greatest twentieth century authors and their immersion into and interaction with American culture in the second half of the twentieth century.

From the Back Cover

Anthony Burgess and America is a biographical and critical analysis of Burgess's decades long relationship with the United States of America between the 1950s and 1990s.

Utilizing Burgess's entire oeuvre and hundreds of newly discovered archived materials, this book evaluates the American inspirations in five Burgess novels: M/F (1971), The Clockwork Testament (1974), Earthly Powers (1980), The End of the World News (1982), and Enderby's Dark Lady (1984). In doing so, this essential new contribution to Burgess scholarship and discourse opens a nearly unexplored area of Burgess's life for investigation and evaluation. Using a wide range of new primary sources, frequently discussed topics by Burgess, such as culture, politics, race, education, obscenity, language, and literature in an American context, are discussed at length to understand how his entanglement with these commentaries influenced his fiction. Because of Burgess's enthusiastic immersion into mass media from the 1960s onward, the book also draws on the surviving record of the public persona that Burgess cultivated to assess the significance of his different forms of utterances.

What emerges is not just a complex personal and public history about one of Britain's greatest twentieth century authors, but also a story of his immersion into and interaction with American culture in the 1960s through to the early 90s. The overall effect is an original, new, and diverse cultural and biographical analysis of Burgess's American-inspired work.

About the Author

Christopher W. Thurley, Ph.D. is an English Instructor at Gaston College