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Burgess, John William, 1844-1931, American educator and political scientist, b. Tennessee. He served in the Union army in the Civil War and after the war graduated from Amherst (1867). He was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1869, but did not practice. That same year he joined the faculty of Knox College. In 1871 he went to Germany, where he studied at the universities of Göttingen, Leipzig, and Berlin. He returned in 1873 to teach history and political science at Amherst. In 1876 he began his long association with Columbia; he was professor of political science and constitutional law until 1912. Burgess, with Nicholas Murray Butler, was a major influence in the creation (1880) of a faculty and school of political science, the first such faculty organized for graduate work in the country and the chief step in changing Columbia College into a university. He was dean of the Faculty of Political Science from 1890 until his retirement. In 1906-7 he served as first Roosevelt professor at the Univ. of Berlin. Burgess's fundamental political philosophy was expressed in Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law (1890-91), the more permanently valuable portions of which were republished as The Foundations of Political Science (1933). He interpreted American history in The Middle Period, 1817-1858, The Civil War and the Constitution, 1859-1865, and Reconstruction and the Constitution, 1866-1876, a trilogy published between 1897 and 1902, to which was added The Administration of Rutherford B. Hayes (1915). In Recent Changes in American Constitutional Theory (1923) he protested against the encroachment of the federal government upon state and individual rights and immunities. He founded the Political Science Quarterly.

See his autobiography, The Reminiscences of an American Scholar (1934); R. G. Hoxie, A History of the Faculty of Political Science, Columbia University (1955).

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia Copyright © 2004.
Licensed from Columbia University Press

Burgess, Gelett

Burgess, Gelett (Frank Gelett Burgess), 1866-1951, American humorist, b. Boston. His ability as an illustrator led him into magazine work, and he was soon writing humorous articles and stories to accompany his illustrations. His best-known poem, "The Purple Cow," first appeared in the San Francisco periodical the Lark (1895-97), of which he was an editor and steady contributor. Among his books are Goops and How to Be Them (1900) and Are You a Bromide? (1907).

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia Copyright © 2004.
Licensed from Columbia University Press

Burgess, Anthony

Burgess, Anthony, 1917-93, English novelist, b. Manchester as John Anthony Burgess Wilson, grad. Manchester Univ., 1940. He taught school in England and in East Asia and pursued an early interest in music. His novels are marked by a surreal, darkly comic imagination. Burgess is acknowledged to have been one of the most imaginative and experimental English prose stylists. Burgess's best-known work is A Clockwork Orange (1962), written in an imaginary teen slang and set in a classless, futuristic society, where an intelligent young hoodlum asserts his individuality by deliberately choosing to do evil. His many other works include the novels Inside Mr. Enderby (1961), MF (1971), Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (1974), Earthly Powers (1980), The Devil's Mode (1989), and the posthumously published A Dead Man in Deptford (1995) and Byrne (1997); as well as a study of James Joyce, Re Joyce (1968).

See his autobiographies, Little Wilson and Big God (1986) and You've Had Your Time (1991); studies by R. Mathews (1978), S. Cole (1981), and G. Aggler (1986).

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia Copyright © 2004.
Licensed from Columbia University Press

Burgess, Anthony

orig. John Anthony Burgess Wilson

(born Feb. 25, 1917, Manchester, Eng.—died Nov. 22, 1993, London) English novelist, critic, and composer. His experiences in Southeast Asia produced the novel trilogy The Long Day Wanes (1956–59). A Clockwork Orange (1962; film, 1971), his most original work, is a satire on extreme political systems. His other novels, which combine mordant wit, moral seriousness, verbal dexterity, and the bizarre, include The Wanting Seed (1962), Inside Mr. Enderby (1963), and Earthly Powers (1980). In addition to his extensive literary criticism, biographies, and works on linguistics and music, he composed more than 65 musical works.

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