Profile of Roger H. Lewis on Famous Like Me

Roger Lewis, a former Fellow of Wolfson College at England's Oxford University, is the biographer of Anthony Burgess (1917-93). Lewis's controversial but, for many readers, penetrating and revealing work Anthony Burgess was published in 2002. Critics could not decide whether it was an out-and-out hatchet job, or a complicated form of tribute, or both.

Lewis has also published books on Laurence Olivier, Peter Sellers and Charles Hawtrey.

Anthony Burgess Lewis's book is filled with animosity towards the writer, and revelations that are not at all revelationary since most are found in the two works of autobiography by Burgess himself (Little Wilson and Big God and You've Had Your Time). One such example is when Lewis reveals that the name Anthony was not on his birth certificate. This is something detailed within the first ten pages of Burgess's first volume of autobiography, where the author reveals that the name Anthony was his confirmation name (and therefore not on his birth certificate). This however becomes for Lewis a major point of identity crisis in Burgess, which eventually leads him to assert that Burgess was a spy. One might think this a postmodern comment on autobiography and an intellectual criss-crossing of fact and fiction, but reading the work you soon learn that it is not. Lewis gives a textual analysis of ABBA ABBA in the appendices to the book and uses the opportunity to do nothing but complain of how Burgess does not match up to Keats or James Joyce. Throughout the work Lewis refuses to try and understand what he calls the 'intractable' elements in the author's work, and instead resorts to vitriol.

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