SOURCE: "Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange: Two Versions," in English Language Notes, Vol. IX, No. 4, June, 1972, pp. 287-92.

In the following essay, Cullinan discusses the effect of the final, twenty-first, chapter of A Clockwork Orange, which was left out of the original American editions.

American readers of A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess' best-known novel, are reading a truncated version of which the author does not approve. The Norton and Ballantine editions published in this country both omit the concluding twenty-first chapter which the English Heinemann edition contains. According to Mr. Burgess the discrepancy arose as a result of his negotiations with Norton for an American edition. Although he had published nine books in England by 1962, only Devil of a State and The Right to an Answer were available in American editions; and he was not well-known here. Evidently Norton insisted that the final chapter, in which the narrator-protagonist...