SOURCE: "Alex on Today's Youth: Creeching Golosses and Filthy Toofles!," in The New York Times Book Review, May 31, 1987, pp. 7, 18.

In the following essay, which takes the form of an interview conducted by Burgess with Alex, the main character of A Clockwork Orange, Burgess examines Alex's personality by having him critique contemporary youth culture.

This month W. W. Norton & Company published a new edition of A Clockwork Orange, including the 21st chapter, which had appeared in the British edition in 1962 but was dropped from the first American version. In that chapter, the teen-age thug Alex, who is the narrator, tires of violence and resolves to turn to a new way of life. Anthony Burgess has had a running argument with the publisher ever since about that chapter, and has expressed strong feelings about Stanley Kubrick's film, which followed the American version of the book. Now, to mark the 25th...