What happens to Alex is terrible but it is worse for the reader.įour men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions-as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer-and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Betrayed by his dictatorial demands by a policing of his violence, he is committed when an old lady dies after an attack he kills again in prison he submits to a new method that will destroy his criminal impulses blameless, he is returned to a world that visits immediate retribution on him he is, when an accidental propulsion to death does not destroy him, foisted upon society once more in his original state of sin. If anyone geta beyond that-this is the first person story of Alex, a teen-age hoodlum, who, in step with his times, viddies himself and the world around him without a care for law, decency, honesty whose autobiographical language has droogies to follow his orders, wallow in his hate and murder moods, accents the vonof human hole products.

Pelham’s cover remained in publication for 25 years.The previous books of this author ( Devil of a State, 1962 The Right to an Answer, 1961) had valid points of satire, some humor, and a contemporary view, but here the picture is all out-from a time in the future to an argot that makes such demands on the reader that no one could care less after the first two pages. It would become one of the most iconic book covers of all time, with variations in both 1973, when the “terrifying film” tagline was removed, and in 1993, when the typography was updated. Having seen the film, he designed a cover that borrowed Alex’s famous bowler hat and turned his mascara-lashed eye into a cog, playing up the ‘clockwork’ theme of free will. The inclusion of the teaser “A TERRIFYING NOVEL… NOW A TERRIFYING FILM” on the book’s cover is all that signifies the paperback’s movie tie-in, which was Kubrick’s doing: when the film’s director legally forbade Penguin from using the design elements of Philip Castle’s film poster, David Pelham was tasked with commissioning an illustration.Īnd when the original illustrator submitted a design that was not only poorly done but extremely late, Pelham was forced to take matters into his own hands. The first Penguin UK publication of the novel ushered in one of the most famous book covers of all time, featuring what is now commonly referred to as the ‘cog-eyed droog’.

Anthony a clockwork orange author