A Clockwork Orange
SynopsisPlot
nightmare vision of the future told in its own fantastically inventive lexicon, it has since become a classic of modern literature and the basis for Stanley Kubrick’s once-banned film, whose recent reissue has brought this revolutionary tale on modern civilization to an even wider audience. Andrew Biswell, PhD, director of the International Burgess Foundation, has taken a close look at the three varying published editions alongside the original typescript to recreate the novel as Anthony Burgess envisioned it.
Story
About this book
A Clockwork Orange, first published in 1962, is Anthony Burgess's novel set in a near-future society where teenage gangs roam freely and the state responds with its own forms of control. The story follows Alex, a young man who leads a small group through nights of violence and crime, narrating events in a slang called Nadsat, a invented vocabulary drawn partly from Russian, Cockney rhyming slang, and other sources. When Alex is arrested and subjected to an experimental conditioning program designed to eliminate his capacity for violence, the novel turns toward questions about free will, state power, and whether forced goodness has any moral value.
Burgess wrote the book in part as a response to behaviorist psychology and the idea that human beings could be engineered into obedience. The American edition originally omitted the final twenty-first chapter, which altered the shape of the story. Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film adaptation, based on the shorter American text, was withdrawn from British cinemas for years at Kubrick's own request.
This revised edition, prepared by Andrew Biswell of the International Burgess Foundation, compares three published versions and the original typescript to reconstruct the text as Burgess intended it. It includes six illustrations drawn by Burgess himself.
