Written between 1960 and 1984, and now collected in one volume, the four 'Enderby' novels are Burgess's finest comic achievement.
Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917 and educated at
Xaverian College and Manchester University. He served in the
British army from 1940 to 1946 and was a schoolteacher in England
before becoming a colonial education officer in 1954. His Malayan
trilogy of novels and a history of English literature were
published while he was living in Malaya and Brunei.
He became a full-time writer in 1959 and achieved a worldwide
reputation as one of the most versatile novelists of his day. His
writings include biographies of Shakespeare and Hemingway, critical
studies of James Joyce, stage plays, and two volumes of
autobiography. His work as a composer and librettist includes the
Broadway musical, Cyrano, and Blooms of Dublin, an operetta based
on Joyce's Ulysses.
His 33 novels continue to be published all over the world. They
include A Clockwork Orange, Nothing Like the Sun, The Complete
Enderby, Earthly Powers, Napoleon Symphony, and Beard's Roman
Women, a collaboration with the photographer David Robinson.
Anthony Burgess died in London in 1993.
The Enderby series are even finer comedies than those by Evelyn
Waugh
*Gore Vidal*
Ferociously funny and wildly verbally inventive
*The Times*
Burgess is at his most inventive in these books, especially when he
gives us the full text of Enderby's songs and sonnets (many of
which are laughably bad). Poetry, Burgess seems to conclude, is
rather like shitting: it's really about purging oneself of dead
matter
*Observer*
Burgess is the great postmodern storehouse of British writing-an
important experimentalist; an encyclopaedic amasser, but also a
maker of form; a playful comic, with a dark gloom
*Malcolm Bradbury*
No less an authority than Harold Bloom rates the Enderby books
among the great comic fictions of our time. Certainly Anthony
Burgess, that dizzying polymath and flamboyant novelist, never
created a more engaging hero than this hapless poet... All in all,
these four books, though diverse in tone and character, strikingly
exhibit the narrative gusto and linguistic sprezzatura of Anthony
Burgess at his best
*Washington Post*
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