Anthony Burgess

Told in 1959 that he had a year to live, Burgess wrote furiously to leave his wife an income. The diagnosis was wrong and the habit stuck, producing more than thirty novels, a mountain of journalism and a quantity of music he maintained was his real work. A Clockwork Orange invents a teenage argot called Nadsat, part Russian, and makes the reader learn it while a violent narrator is conditioned out of the ability to choose. The American edition dropped the final chapter, Kubrick filmed that version, and Burgess spent decades complaining about both. Nothing Like the Sun is a novel about Shakespeare's love life written in a dense Elizabethan English.