Im doing a research paper over him and one of the main things i have to write about it how his most famous book relates to his life.
I took a look at this and there isn't anything so "disturbing" as to translate into his famous title. If anything Burgess dismissed it as one of his lesser works. He felt that it was Kubrick's film which made the book so popular. If there is anything in his childhood that reflected the movie it would be that he felt alone and was picked on,
[Burgess has said of his largely solitary childhood: "I was either distractedly persecuted or ignored. I was one despised ... Ragged boys in gangs would pounce on the well-dressed like myself."]
I think it was Burgess's talent as a writer and a critic which is the reason for the novel's counter-culture success. The most telling irony is that Burgess, more or less, repudiates the book,
"We all suffer from the popular desire to make the known notorious. The book I am best known for, or only known for, is a novel I am prepared to repudiate: written a quarter of a century ago, a jeu d'esprit knocked off for money in three weeks, it became known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence. The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me till I die. I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation, and the same may be said of Lawrence and Lady Chatterley's Lover."
Here is a source-link for the above.
If you read the Introduction in any published copy of the novella it tells about Burgess's encounter with the same type of beating the writer and his wife encountered in the beginning of the book. He was brutally beaten along with his wife.
