You've Had Your Time
  • Published: 3 April 2014
  • ISBN: 9781473512399
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 416

You've Had Your Time

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EBook
3 Apr 2014
Paperback
1 Nov 2002
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Following Little Wilson and Big God, this is the second volume of Anthony Burgess's autobiography, spanning the years from 1959 - 1982, from the start of his professional writing career to the centenary of James Joyce's birth and its effect on Burgess.

After returning from a trip to Brunei, Anthony Burgess, initially believing he has only a year to live, begins to write - novels, film scripts, television series, articles. It is the life of a man desperate to earn a living through the written word. He finds at first that writing brings little success, and later that success, and the obligations it brings, interfere with his writing - especially of fiction. There were vast Hollywood projects destined never to be made, novels the critics snarled at, journalism that scandalised the morally scrupulous.

There is the éclat of A Clockwork Orange (and the consequent calls for Burgess to comment on violent atrocities), the huge success - after a long barren period - of Earthly Powers. There is a terrifying first marriage, his description of which is both painful and funny. His second marriage - and the discovery that he has a four-year-old son - changes his life dramatically, and he and Liana escape to the Mediterranean, for an increasingly European life. With this marriage comes the triumphant rebirth of sex, creative energy and travel - to America, to Australia and all over Europe.
  • Published: 3 April 2014
  • ISBN: 9781473512399
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 416
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About the author

Anthony Burgess

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.

He achieved a worldwide reputation as one of the leading novelists of his day, and one of the most versitile. His writings include criticism, scripts and translations, and a Broadway musical, and he composed three symphonies which have been publicly performed in the USA. His books have been published all over the world and include A Clockwork Orange, The Clockwork Testament, Inside Mr Enderby, Enderby's Dark Lady, Earthly Powers, Abba Abba and The End of the World News.

Anthony Burgess died in 1993.

portrait photo of Anthony Burgess

Also by Anthony Burgess

Clockwork Orange: Popular Penguins
The Wanting Seed
A Dead Man in Deptford
M/F
Earthly Powers
The Complete Enderby
Little Wilson and Big God
See all

Praise for You've Had Your Time

Extraordinarily lively, amazingly zestful, gutsy, bawdy fun

Sunday Express

What Burgess ''shows off'' in these pages is the vivid interest that a writer's life can hold when it is lived by a writer with a robust temperament, a showman's appetite for vulgarity and the kind of gargantuan, omnivorous learning that helps give polymathy a good name... You've Had Your Time is an exhilarating book which, like the best of Burgess's novels, fulfills the ancient obligations of delighting, instructing and moving with incomparable panache

Independent

This autobiography, packed with extraordinary moments... provides a unique picture of today's literary world. It also has the effect of pinning Burgess down, making him, improbable as he is, real and believable. We will, I think read him better for this, and appreciate him more

Observer

In two huge volumes of "confessions" Burgess wove a vast tapestry of his life. William Boyd, an admirer, said they were among the best novels that Burgess ever wrote

Guardian
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