A Clockwork Orange

A new critical edition to celebrate the 50th anniversary of A Clockwork Orange — one of the most influential books of the twentieth century.

First published by William Heinemann in 1962, A Clockwork Orange is the best known of Anthony Burgess's thirty-three remarkable novels, and is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. For more than twenty years A Clockwork Orange circulated in two distinct editions with two different endings. This special edition to mark the 50th Anniversary of first publication restores the text of the novel as Burgess originally wrote it, along with a selection of interviews, articles, reviews and other previously unpublished material.

Featuring a biographical introduction by Andrew Biswell, Burgess's biographer — examining the background to the novel's composition and its subsequent editorial and publication history — this new edition also includes the full novel, newly edited from the 1961 typescript with the restoration of illustrations and music and a previously unpublished dramatic prologue from the Burgess archive in Austin, Texas.

This new edition places the novel within its immediate historical and cultural contexts and will be the definitive edition to excite critics and readers alike.

A newly revised text for A Clockwork Orange's 50th anniversary brings the work closest to its author's intentions.

A Clockwork Orange is as brilliant, transgressive, and influential as when it was published fifty years ago. A 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. We publish this landmark edition with its original British cover and six of Burgess's own illustrations.

Anthony Burgess is the author of many works, including The Wanting Seed, Nothing Like the Sun, The Doctor Is Sick, The Long Day Wanes, Honey for the Bears, and ReJoyce. He died in 1993.Andrew Biswell, PhD, is the author of The Real Life of Anthony Burgess.