Book description
This is the first volume of Anthony Burgess's two-volume
autobiography. It tells the story of a disaffected Manchester Catholic
from his birth in 1917 up to the commencement, in 1959, of his career
as a professional writer. Born Jack Wilson, Burgess grew up in one of
the toughest areas of Manchester between the wars. His childhood in
his stepmother's rowdy slummy pub, and later in a tobacconist's shop
and an off-licence in Moss Side, offered little in the way of love,
though later, in the attic bedroom he shares with a succession of
putative maids, he was precociously initiated into the physical side
of it.
This autobiography also deals with his awareness of a burgeoning
artistic talent which for a long time could not find a proper outlet:
should he be a cartoonist, a composer, a pianist, a poet? It deals
with his unending struggle to reconcile a Catholic conscience with the
prematurely discovered pleasures of sex. It also details the long
tempestuous relationship with his first wife Lynne, an army career
more comic than heroic, and his years as an education officer in
Malaya and Borneo. As drinking, infidelity and despair take their
toll, Burgess begins to write the first of the novels that would gain
him fame if not money.
Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917. He served in the army
from 1940 to 1954 before becoming a colonial education officer. It was
while he held this post that doctors told him he would die, and he
decided to try to live by writing. A prolific and respected author,
Burgess died in 1993.
