But they were not important to my New York publisher. The book he brought out had only twenty chapters. He insisted on cutting out the twenty-first. I could, of course, have demurred at this and taken my book elsewhere, but it was considered that he was being charitable in accepting the work at all, and that all other New York, or Boston, pub-lishers would kick out the manuscript on its dog-ear. I needed money back in 1961, even the pittance I was being offered as an advance, and if the condition of the book's acceptance was also its truncation-well, so be it. So there is a profound difference between A Clockwork Orange as Great Britain knows it and the somewhat slimmer volume that bears the same name in the United States of America.

Let us go further. The rest of the world was sold the book out of Great Britain, and so most versions-certainly the French, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Russian, Hebrew, Rumanian, and German translations-have the original twenty-one chapters. Now when Stanley Kubrick made his film-though he made it in England-he followed the American version and, so it seemed to his audiences outside America, ended the story somewhat prematurely. Audiences did not exactly clamour for their money back, but they wondered why Kubrick left out the dénouement. People wrote to me about this-indeed much of my later life has been expended on Xeroxing statements of intention and the frustrations of intention- while both Kubrick and my New York publisher coolly bask in the rewards of their misdemeanor. Life is of course, terrible.

What happens in that twenty-first chapter? You now have the chance to find out.