What may have influenced Anthony Burgess's writing of A Clockwork Orange?

In the famous dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess writes of a teen named Alex who engages in "ultra-violence" with his cronies until he is captured and subjected to an extreme form of behavior modification by the state. Eventually, after traumatizing experiences upon his release, Alex's violent tendencies return, whereupon he exclaims: "I was cured all right." Numerous influences prompted Anthony Burgess to write this dark futuristic vision.

Literary influences include dystopian classics such as Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, and Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley. Burgess was also influenced by works on behaviorism by B. F. Skinner.

In 1959, Burgess returned to England from overseas teaching posts to discover an emerging new youth culture of drugs, violence, and pop music. The violence in the novel was also inspired by an attack by American soldiers his first wife suffered during a World War II blackout.

The unique slang called Nadsat that Alex the narrator uses to tell his story is the result of Burgess's visit to Leningrad in 1961. The word "Nadsat" means "teen" in Russian, and Burgess uses many Russian words in it, as well as criminal slang and a smattering of Romany words and phrases.

According to Burgess, the novel's unique title comes from a phrase of East London slang: "as queer as a clockwork orange." In an interview Burgess said, "I've implied a junction of the organic, the lively, the sweet—in other words, life, the orange—and the mechanical, the cold, the disciplined."

What may have influenced Anthony Burgess's writing of A Clockwork Orange?

The influences on Anthony Burgess' A Clcokwork Orange were both historical and personal. Much of the novel reflects Burgess' reactions to a visit to the Soviet Union in 1961 and his revulsion against the way in which the totalitarian state controlled the lives and behavior of the people. He also noted the growth of a violent youth gang culture in Russia quite similar to that he found at home in the impoverished inner cities of Britain. His notion of gang violence as a response to an over-controlling state led him to become an advocate of anarchism.

The specific personal; incident leading to the novel was an episode in which some AWOL United States soldiers stationed in England during World War II assaulted his pregnant wife, killing their baby, and precipitated in his wife a form of PTSD leading her to alcohol and eventually premature death.

LIteray influences include many modernist authors such as James Joyce and Flann O'Brien (who also used polyglot language) and dystopian science fiction.

What events or issues from the 1960s might have influenced the writing of A Clockwork Orange?

Interestingly, a massive influence on Anthony Burgess was a trip that he took to the Soviet Union, what is now Russia. Burgess was both fascinated and shocked in equal measure by the various gangs that he saw in Leningrad and how difficult it was for society to control them because the police were mainly focusing on the various ideological crimes that were being perpetrated against the state. This helps him to form the "droogs," which are a combination of Russian and American/British youth culture. In the 1960s in Britain, the youths were sharply divided between the Mods and the Rockers, and so gang violence and identity was something that was on everybody's mind at the time.

In addition, another issue that interested Burgess was that of state control in people's lives and took away freedom of thought and individual responsibility and gave it to the state. The extreme example of this was of course the Soviet Union again, but also in the late 1940s under a Labour government Britain initiated many policies that had a definite socialist slant, such as the establishment of the National Health Service and the nationalisation of various industries.

These two historical elements can therefore be seen in the creation of this novel.