Introduction: A Clockwork Orange Resucked

Burgess, Anthony. "Introduction: A Clockwork Orange Resucked." Rolling Stone 496 (26 March 1987): 74, 76.

AB's introduction to the first American publication of A Clockwork Orange with its final chapter: New York: Ballantine, 1988 (Ch. 21, omitted in the Norton edn. published in the USA—the basis for S. Kubrick's film; see entry for AB under Fiction, and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE under Drama). Explains, among other things, the Cockney origins of the phrase, "A Clockwork Orange." Invites American readers to choose between the British version's "Pelagian unwillingness" to see a human being as irredeemable, and the American "Nixonian book with no shred of optimism in it." Notes that "The American or Kubrickian Orange is a fable; the British or international one is a novel" (76).