George Orwell Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Burmese Days (1934)
  2. A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935)
  3. Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)
  4. Coming Up for Air (1939)
  5. Animal Farm (1945)
  6. 1984 (1949)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
  2. The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)
  3. Homage to Catalonia (1938)
  4. Dickens, Dali and Others (1946)
  5. Shooting an Elephant (1950)
  6. British Pamphleteers (1951)
  7. Critical Essays (1951)
  8. England Your England and Other Essays (1953)
  9. Selected Essays/Inside the Whale and Other Essays (1957)
  10. Selected Writings (1958)
  11. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (1961)
  12. The Lion and the Unicorn (1962)
  13. Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays (1965)
  14. As I Please, 1943-1945 (1968)
  15. A Collection of Essays (1970)
  16. An Age Like This 1920-1940 (1971)
  17. In Front of Your Nose 1945-1950 (1971)
  18. My Country Right or Left 1940-1943 (1980)
  19. The English People (1982)
  20. The Penguin Essays of George Orwell (1984)
  21. The War Broadcasts (1985)
  22. Orwell The Lost Writings (1985)
  23. War Commentaries (1985)
  24. Orwell: The War Commentaries (1985)
  25. Selected Prose (1991)
  26. The Sayings of George Orwell (1994)
  27. Pages From a Scullion’s Diary (1995)
  28. All Propaganda is Lies (1999)
  29. Facing Unpleasant Facts (1999)
  30. I Belong to the Left (1999)
  31. I Have Tried to Tell the Truth (1999)
  32. It Is What I Think (1999)
  33. Keeping Our Little Corner Clean (1999)
  34. A Kind of Compulsion (1999)
  35. Our Job is to Make Life Worth Living (1999)
  36. A Patriot After All (1999)
  37. Smothered Under Journalism (1999)
  38. Two Wasted Years (1999)
  39. Orwell and Politics (2001)
  40. Orwell and the Dispossessed (2001)
  41. Orwell in Spain (2001)
  42. Orwell’s England (2001)
  43. Orwell: The ‘Observer’ Years (2003)
  44. Why I Write (2004)
  45. Orwell In Tribune (2007)
  46. Books v. Cigarettes (2008)
  47. All Art Is Propaganda (2008)
  48. Orwell: A Celebration (2009)
  49. Narrative Essays (2009)
  50. Diaries (2009)
  51. Such, Such Were the Joys and Other Essays (2010)
  52. A Life in Letters (2010)
  53. Orwell on Truth (2017)
  54. Notes on Nationalism (2018)
  55. Orwell on Freedom (2018)

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

George Orwell Books Overview

Burmese Days

Purchase one of 1st World Library’s Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www. 1stWorldLibrary. ORG U Po Kyin, Sub divisional Magistrate of Kyauktada, in Upper Burma, was sitting in his veranda. It was only half past eight, but the month was April, and there was a closeness in the air, a threat of the long, stifling midday hours. Occasional faint breaths of wind, seeming cool by contrast, stirred the newly drenched orchids that hung from the eaves. Beyond the orchids one could see the dusty, curved trunk of a palm tree, and then the blazing ultramarine sky. Up in the zenith, so high that it dazzled one to look at them, a few vultures circled without the quiver of a wing. Unblinking, rather like a great porcelain idol, U Po Kyin gazed out into the fierce sunlight. He was a man of fifty, so fat that for years he had not risen from his chair without help, and yet shapely and even beautiful in his grossness; for the Burmese do not sag and bulge like white men, but grow fat symmetrically, like fruits swelling. His face was vast, yellow and quite unwrin kled, and his eyes were tawny. His feet squat, high arched feet with the toes all the same length were bare, and so was his cropped head, and he wore one of those vivid Arakanese longyis with green and magenta checks which the Burmese wear on informal occasions. He was chewing betel from a lacquered box on the table, and thinking about his past life.

A Clergyman’s Daughter

Intimidated by her father, the rector of Knype Hill, Dorothy performs her submissive roles of dutiful daughter and bullied housekeeper. Her thoughts are taken up with the costumes she is making for the church school play, by the hopelessness of preaching to the poor and by debts she cannot pay in 1930s Depression England. Suddenly her routine shatters and Dorothy finds herself down and out in London. She is wearing silk stockings, has money in her pocket and cannot remember her name. Orwell leads us through a landscape of unemployment, poverty and hunger, where Dorothy’s faith is challenged by a social reality that changes her life.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Gordon Comstock loathes dull, middle class respectability and worship of money. He gives up a ‘good job’ in advertising to work part time in a bookshop, giving him more time to write. But he slides instead into a self induced poverty that destroys his creativity and his spirit. Only Rosemary, ever faithful Rosemary, has the strength to challenge his commitment to his chosen way of life. Through the character of Gordon Comstock, Orwell reveals his own disaffection with the society he once himself renounced.

Coming Up for Air

Purchase one of 1st World Library’s Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www. 1stWorldLibrary. ORG The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth. I remember the morning well. At about a quarter to eight I’d nipped out of bed and got into the bathroom just in time to shut the kids out. It was a beastly January morning, with a dirty yellowish grey sky. Down below, out of the little square of bathroom window, I could see the ten yards by five of grass, with a privet hedge round it and a bare patch in the middle, that we call the back garden. There’s the same back garden, some privets, and same grass, behind every house in Ellesmere Road. Only difference where there are no kids there’s no bare patch in the middle. I was trying to shave with a bluntish razor blade while the water ran into the bath. My face looked back at me out of the mirror, and underneath, in a tumbler of water on the little shelf over the washbasin, the teeth that belonged in the face. It was the temporary set that Warner, my dentist, had given me to wear while the new ones were being made. I haven’t such a bad face, really. It’s one of those bricky red faces that go with butter coloured hair and pale blue eyes. I’ve never gone grey or bald, thank God, and when I’ve got my teeth in I probably don’t look my age, which is forty five.

1984

Purchase one of 1st World Library’s Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www. 1stWorldLibrary. ORG It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted imply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

Down and Out in Paris and London

Orwells own experiences inspire this semi autobiographical novel about a man living in Paris in the early 1930s without a penny. The narrators poverty brings him into contact with strange incidents and characters, which he manages to chronicle with sensitivity and graphic power. The latter half of the book takes the English narrator to his home city, London, where the world of poverty is different in externals only.A socialist who believed that the lower clas*ses were the wellspring of world reform, Orwell actually went to live among them in England and on the continent. His novel draws on his experiences of this world, from the bottom of the echelon in the kitchens of posh French restaurants to the free lodging houses, tramps, and street people of London. In the tales of both cities, we learn some sobering Orwellian truths about poverty and society.

The Road to Wigan Pier

A searing account of George Orwell’s observations of working class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire in the 1930s, ‘The Road to Wigan Pier‘ is a brilliant and bitter polemic that has lost none of its political impact over time. His graphically unforgettable descriptions of social injustice, cramped slum housing, dangerous mining conditions, squalor, hunger and growing unemployment are written with unblinking honesty, fury and great humanity. It crystallized the ideas that would be found in Orwell’s later works and novels, and remains a powerful portrait of poverty, injustice and class divisions in Britain.

Homage to Catalonia

‘Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism as I understand it’. Thus wrote Orwell following his experiences as a militiaman in the Spanish Civil War, chronicled in ‘Homage to Catalonia‘. Here he brings to bear all the force of his humanity, passion and clarity, describing with bitter intensity the bright hopes and cynical betrayals of that chaotic episode.

Dickens, Dali and Others

Ten celebrated essays by a man universally regarded as a master of the essay form. Included are such classics as ‘Charles Dickens,’ ‘The Art of Donald McGill,’ ‘Boys’ Weeklies,’ ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish,’ and ‘Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali.’

Selected Essays/Inside the Whale and Other Essays

Book Jacket Status: JacketedA generous and varied selection the only hardcover edition available of the literary and political writings of one of the greatest essayists of the twentieth century. Although best known as the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty four, George Orwell left an even more lastingly significant achievement in his voluminous essays, which dealt with all the great social, political, and literary questions of the day and exemplified an incisive prose style that is still universally admired. Included among the more than 240 essays in this volume are Orwell’s famous discussion of pacifism, My Country Right or Left ; his scathingly complicated views on the dirty work of imperialism in Shooting an Elephant ; and his very firm opinion on how to make A Nice Cup of Tea. In his essays, Orwell elevated political writing to the level of art, and his motivating ideas his desire for social justice, his belief in universal freedom and equality, and his concern for truth in language are as enduringly relevant now, a hundred years after his birth, as ever.

Selected Writings

A selection of writings by George Orwell.

The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters

Considering that much of his life was spent in poverty and ill health, it is something of a miracle that in only forty six years George Orwell managed to publish ten books and two collections of essays. Here, in four fat volumes, is the best selection of his non fiction available, a trove of letters, essays, reviews, and journalism that is breathtaking in its scope and eclectic passions. Orwell had something to say about just about everyone and everything. His letters to such luminaries as Julian Symons, Anthony Powell, Arthur Koestler, and Cyril Connolly are poignant and personal. His essays, covering everything from ‘English Cooking’ to ‘Literature and Totalitarianism,’ are memorable, and his books reviews Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Mumford’s Herman Melville, Miller’s Black Spring, Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield to name just a few are among the most lucid and intelligent ever written. From 1943 to l945, he wrote a regular column for the Tribune, a left wing weekly, entitled ‘As I Please.’ His observations about life in Britain during the war embraced everything from anti American sentiment to the history of domestic appliances.

As I Please, 1943-1945

Considering that much of his life was spent in poverty and ill health, it is something of a miracle that in only forty six years George Orwell managed to publish ten books and two collections of essays. Here, in four fat volumes, is the best selection of his non fiction available, a trove of letters, essays, reviews, and journalism that is breathtaking in its scope and eclectic passions. Orwell had something to say about just about everyone and everything. His letters to such luminaries as Julian Symons, Anthony Powell, Arthur Koestler, and Cyril Connolly are poignant and personal. His essays, covering everything from ‘English Cooking’ to ‘Literature and Totalitarianism,’ are memorable, and his books reviews Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Mumford’s Herman Melville, Miller’s Black Spring, Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield to name just a few are among the most lucid and intelligent ever written. From 1943 to l945, he wrote a regular column for the Tribune, a left wing weekly, entitled ‘As I Please.’ His observations about life in Britain during the war embraced everything from anti American sentiment to the history of domestic appliances.

A Collection of Essays

In this bestselling compilation of essays, written in the clear eyed, uncompromising language for which he is famous, Orwell discusses with vigor such diverse subjects as his boyhood schooling, the Spanish Civil War, Henry Miller, British imperialism, and the profession of writing.

An Age Like This 1920-1940

Considering that much of his life was spent in poverty and ill health, it is something of a miracle that in only forty six years George Orwell managed to publish ten books and two collections of essays. Here, in four fat volumes, is the best selection of his non fiction available, a trove of letters, essays, reviews, and journalism that is breathtaking in its scope and eclectic passions. Orwell had something to say about just about everyone and everything. His letters to such luminaries as Julian Symons, Anthony Powell, Arthur Koestler, and Cyril Connolly are poignant and personal. His essays, covering everything from ‘English Cooking’ to ‘Literature and Totalitarianism,’ are memorable, and his books reviews Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Mumford’s Herman Melville, Miller’s Black Spring, Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield to name just a few are among the most lucid and intelligent ever written. From 1943 to l945, he wrote a regular column for the Tribune, a left wing weekly, entitled ‘As I Please.’ His observations about life in Britain during the war embraced everything from anti American sentiment to the history of domestic appliances.

In Front of Your Nose 1945-1950

Considering that much of his life was spent in poverty and ill health, it is something of a miracle that in only forty six years George Orwell managed to publish ten books and two collections of essays. Here, in four fat volumes, is the best selection of his non fiction available, a trove of letters, essays, reviews, and journalism that is breathtaking in its scope and eclectic passions. Orwell had something to say about just about everyone and everything. His letters to such luminaries as Julian Symons, Anthony Powell, Arthur Koestler, and Cyril Connolly are poignant and personal. His essays, covering everything from ‘English Cooking’ to ‘Literature and Totalitarianism,’ are memorable, and his books reviews Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Mumford’s Herman Melville, Miller’s Black Spring, Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield to name just a few are among the most lucid and intelligent ever written. From 1943 to l945, he wrote a regular column for the Tribune, a left wing weekly, entitled ‘As I Please.’ His observations about life in Britain during the war embraced everything from anti American sentiment to the history of domestic appliances.

My Country Right or Left 1940-1943

Considering that much of his life was spent in poverty and ill health, it is something of a miracle that in only forty six years George Orwell managed to publish ten books and two collections of essays. Here, in four fat volumes, is the best selection of his non fiction available, a trove of letters, essays, reviews, and journalism that is breathtaking in its scope and eclectic passions. Orwell had something to say about just about everyone and everything. His letters to such luminaries as Julian Symons, Anthony Powell, Arthur Koestler, and Cyril Connolly are poignant and personal. His essays, covering everything from ‘English Cooking’ to ‘Literature and Totalitarianism,’ are memorable, and his books reviews Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Mumford’s Herman Melville, Miller’s Black Spring, Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield to name just a few are among the most lucid and intelligent ever written. From 1943 to l945, he wrote a regular column for the Tribune, a left wing weekly, entitled ‘As I Please.’ His observations about life in Britain during the war embraced everything from anti American sentiment to the history of domestic appliances.

The English People

The author of ‘Nineteen eighty Four’, ‘Animal Farm’, and ‘Homage to Catalonia,’ here interprets in succinct style the social history of the British isles and its people. ILLUS.

All Propaganda is Lies

On August 18, 1941, George Orwell joined the BBC’s Overseas Service. After a crash training course, he was appointed a Talks Producer responsible for features, talks, and commentaries on the war, to be broadcast to India. He wrote at least 220 news commentaries broadcast to India, Malaya, and Indonesia, of which Orwell read 56. This volume shows that formal censorship was not as great a problem as has been supposed although it obviously occurred, and Orwell’s brushes with censors are shown in detail.

Facing Unpleasant Facts

George Orwell was first and foremost an essayist. From his earliest published article in 1928 to his untimely death in 1950, he produced an extraordinary array of short nonfiction that reflected and illuminated the fraught times in which he lived and wrote. ‘As soon as he began to write something,’ comments George Packer in his foreword to this new two volume collection, ‘it was as natural for Orwell to propose, generalize, qualify, argue, judge in short, to think as it was for Yeats to versify or Dickens to invent.’Facing Unpleasant Facts charts Orwell’s development as a master of the narrative essay form and unites classics such as ‘Shooting an Elephant’ with lesser known journalism and passages from his wartime diary. Whether detailing the horrors of Orwell’s boyhood in an English boarding school or bringing to life the sights, sounds, and smells of the Spanish Civil War, these narrative essays weave together the personal and the political in an unmistakable style that is at once plainspoken and brilliantly complex.

I Belong to the Left

On March 29, 1945 Orwell’s wife Eileen died at age 39, and her last moving letters to her husband are printed here. Less than six months later, the novel that she might be said to have nurtured and which gave Orwell world wide fame, Animal Farm, was published. ‘Politics and the English Language,’ one of Orwell’s most important essays, was immediately reprinted for journalists of The Observer and News of the World as a guide to good writing. Essays and articles he wrote for The Observer, Manchester Evening News, and Evening Standard are reprinted here, as well as correspondence that shows he had begun writing 1984.

I Have Tried to Tell the Truth

Orwell reviewed 86 books as Literary Editor of Tribune in addition to his ‘As I Please’ column, printed without cuts in this edition. Also included are literary essays, The English People, four London Letters, and Can Socialists Be Happy?, written under the pseudonym John Freeman.

It Is What I Think

Much of 1947 and 1948 was taken up with Orwell’s struggle to complete 1984 and his fight against illness. He was admitted to the hospital and continued to work on ‘Such, Such Were the Joys,’ he wrote several essays, and he continued to review. Changes made in the course of the production of Orwell’s radio version of Animal Farm are listed, and his second Literary Notebook is reproduced.

Keeping Our Little Corner Clean

During this period, in addition to the magazine program, Voice, Orwell continued to develop what would now be called an ‘open university’ broadcasts by distinguished speakers on texts set for Bombay and Calcutta university degrees. He enlisted such speakers as E.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot, and Joseph Needham, and the broadcasts were backed up by publications printed in India for university students. Some of Orwell’s scripts, such as that for his ‘Imaginary Interview with Jonathan Swift,’ pose difficult textual problems and these are fully examined and annotated. Additionally, the script of Eileen Blair’s broadcast for the series, ‘In Your Kitchen’ has been included. Orwell still found time to write a number of reviews, contribute to Partisan Review, and write essays on Hardy, Henry Miller, and Yeats.

A Kind of Compulsion

Volume 10 of The Complete Works of George OrwellThis volume begins with Orwell’s illustrated letters home from prep school and the stories, poems and contributions to college publications he wrote at Eton. Then there are his articles and essays on poverty, censorship and imperialist exploitation first published in Paris in 1928 29, his early reviews, his first important essay, ‘A Hanging,’ and correspondence dealing with the publication of Down and Out in Paris and London and the censorship of Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter, and Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

Our Job is to Make Life Worth Living

While a patient at the Cotswold Sanatorium, Orwell read the proofs of 1984 and wrote five reviews. He began but did not finish an article on Evelyn Waugh, made notes for an essay on Conrad, and sketched out a long short story, ‘A Smoking Room Story.’ The volume includes many unpublished letters, Warburg’s report on his visit to Cranham, a clarification of Orwell’s public statement on 1984, and a detailed examination of Orwell’s relationship with the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office.

A Patriot After All

For the twenty month period of this volume, there are reproduced 123 book, 38 theatre, and 43 film reviews. Additionally, Inside the Whale, Orwell’s first collection of essays, and The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius are reprinted here. Throughout this period Orwell kept a wartime diary, and its entries are printed chronologically with his reviews, essays, and letters. It was in 1941 that Orwell began his series of ‘London Letters’ for Partisan Review, and the volume also includes Orwell’s lecture notes for instructing members of his Home Guard platoon.

Smothered Under Journalism

Journalism took a heavy toll on Orwell in the first months of 1946. Despite this unremitting pressure, he produced a major sequence of articles on ‘The Intellectual Revolt,’ and wrote one of his finest short essays, ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad.’ He wrote two radio plays for the BBC, and a pamphlet for the British Council, all of which are printed here for the first time. Orwell renewed contact with Yvonne Davet, he corresponded with Ihor Szewczenko, he tried to get Victor Serge’s memoirs published in English, and he attempted to expose Soviet responsibility for the massacre of the Poles by arranging for a translation of Joseph Czapski’s Souvenirs de Starobielsk to be published.

Two Wasted Years

Orwell described his time at the BBC as ‘Two Wasted Years,’ yet this volume continues to show how much he achieved. Among the educational series in this period were those devoted to new developments in science, modern English verse, great dramatists, and psychology. Orwell continued to broadcast to Malaya, and wrote and read news commentaries for Indonesia. He wrote over a dozen reviews, several essays, and a long study, The Detective Story, printed here for the first time in its original French version and an English translation. The volume concludes with the devastating report by an Intelligence Officer on the ineffectiveness of the BBC’s broadcasting service to India, as well as Orwell’s preparatory notes for The Quick & the Dead and The Last Man in Europe.

Orwell and Politics

Orwell’s classic satire ‘Animal Farm’ continues to be an international best seller. For the first time ever, ‘Orwell and Politics‘ brings this major work together with the author’s other works exploring the nature of politics and the Second World War.

Orwell and the Dispossessed

This volume brings together Orwell’s powerful writings of his personal experiences of poverty and life outside mainstream society. The complete texts of ‘Down and out in Paris and London’ is included.

Orwell in Spain

The volume collects together, for the first time ever, Orwell’s writings on his experience of the Spanish Civil War the chaos at the Front, the futile young deaths for what became a confused cause, the antique weapons and the disappointment many British Socialists felt on arriving in Spain to help. Orwell in Spain includes the complete text of HOMAGE TO CATALONIA.

Orwell’s England

Collected together for the first time, this volume includes the complete text of ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’ Orwell’s vivid and impassioned documentary of unemployment and proletarian life as well as Orwell’s best writing on the political and social condition of England.

Why I Write

Table of Contents: Why I Write THE SPIKEA HANGINGBOOKSHOP MEMORIESSHOOTING AN ELEPHANTDOWN THE MINENORTH AND SOUTHSPILLING THE SPANISH BEANSMARRAKECHBOYS WEEKLIES AND FRANK RICHARDS S REPLYCHARLES DICKENSCHARLES READEINSIDE THE WHALETHE ART OF DONALD MCGILLTHE LION AND THE UNICORN: SOCIALISM AND THE ENGLISH GENIUSWELLS, HITLER AND THE WORLD STATELOOKING BACK ON THE SPANISH WARRUDYARD KIPLINGMARK TWAIN THE LICENSED JESTERPOETRY AND THE MICROPHONEW B YEATSARTHUR KOESTLERBENEFIT OF CLERGY: SOME NOTES ON SALVADOR DALIRAFFLES AND MISS BLANDISHANTISEMITISM IN BRITAINFREEDOM OF THE PARKFUTURE OF A RUINED GERMANYGOOD BAD BOOKSIN DEFENCE OF P. G. WODEHOUSENONSENSE POETRYNOTES ON NATIONALISMREVENGE IS SOURTHE SPORTING SPIRITYOU AND THE ATOMIC BOMBA GOOD WORD FOR THE VICAR OF BRAYA NICE CUP OF TEABOOKS VS. CIGARETTESCONFESSIONS OF A BOOK REVIEWERDECLINE OF THE ENGLISH MURDERHOW THE POOR DIEJAMES BURNHAM AND THE MANAGERIAL REVOLUTIONPLEASURE SPOTSPOLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGEPOLITICS VS. LITERATURE: AN EXAMINATION OF GULLIVER S TRAVELSRIDING DOWN FROM BANGORSOME THOUGHTS ON THE COMMON TOADTHE PREVENTION OF LITERATURELEAR, TOLSTOY AND THE FOOLSUCH, SUCH WERE THE JOYSWRITERS AND LEVIATHANREFLECTIONS ON GANDHI a selection from Why I Write: From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books. I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life. Nevertheless the volume of serious i.e. seriously intended writing which I produced all through my childhood and boyhood would not amount to half a dozen pages. I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five, my mother taking it down to dictation. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about a tiger and the tiger had chair like teeth a good enough phrase, but I fancy the poem was a plagiarism of Blake s Tiger, Tiger . At eleven, when the war or 1914 18 broke out, I wrote a patriotic poem which was printed in the local newspaper, as was another, two years later, on the death of Kitchener. From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrote bad and usually unfinished nature poems in the Georgian style. I also attempted a short story which was a ghastly failure. That was the total of the would be serious work that I actually set down on paper during all those years. However, throughout this time I did in a sense engage in literary activities. To begin with there was the made to order stuff which I produced quickly, easily and without much pleasure to myself. Apart from school work, I wrote VERS D OCCASION, semi comic poems which I could turn out at what now seems to me astonishing speed at fourteen I wrote a whole rhyming play, in imitation of Aristophanes, in about a week and helped to edit a school magazines, both printed and in manuscript…
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All Art Is Propaganda

As a critic, George Orwell cast a wide net. Equally at home discussing Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin, he moved back and forth across the porous borders between essay and journalism, high art and low. A frequent commentator on literature, language, film, and drama throughout his career, Orwell turned increasingly to the critical essay in the 1940s, when his most important experiences were behind him and some of his most incisive writing lay ahead. All Art Is Propaganda follows Orwell as he demonstrates in piece after piece how intent analysis of a work or body of work gives rise to trenchant aesthetic and philosophical commentary. With masterpieces such as ‘Politics and the English Language’ and ‘Rudyard Kipling’ and gems such as ‘Good Bad Books,’ here is an unrivaled education in, as George Packer puts it, ‘how to be interesting, line after line.’

Diaries

George Orwell was an inveterate keeper of Diaries. Eleven Diaries are presented here, and we know there may be two more from his time in Spain hidden away in the NKVD Archives in Moscow. Covering the period 1931 1949, this volume follows Orwell from his early years as a writer up to his last literary notebook. His ‘Hop Picking Diary’ covers some of Orwell’s time spent down and out; a wonderful entry from 1931 tells of a communal shave in the Trafalgar Square fountains. The notes from his travels through industrial England, which formed the basis of ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’, show the development of the gifted young novelist and impassioned social commentator. ‘Frightful landscape of slag heaps and belching chimneys…
. Beards of ice on lock gates.’ This same acute power of observation is evident in his Diaries from Morocco, where he also encountered extreme poverty. We catch a glimpse of a different Orwell at home. His domestic Diaries chart the progress of his garden and animals with a keen eye, from the succinct, ‘Pig active again’. to the more poetic, ‘One of the plants that carries the snow most beautifully is lavender.’ The wartime Diaries make fascinating reading, from descriptions of events overseas, to the daily violence closer to home and his astute perspective on the politics of both. Orwell offers a different take on the typical view of the home front. ‘War is simply a reversal of civilised life, its motto is ‘Evil be thou my good’, and so much of the good of modern life is actually evil that it is questionable whether on balance war does harm’. The Diaries provide a new and entirely refreshing insight into Orwell’s character and help towards an understanding of his great works.

Such, Such Were the Joys and Other Essays

Viewed as too libelous to print in England until 1968, the title essay in this collection reveals the abuse Orwell experienced as a child at an expensive and snobbish boarding school and offers insights into his lifelong concern for the oppressed. ”Why I Write” describes Orwell’s sense of political purpose, and the classic essay ”Politics and the English Language” insists on clarity and precision in communication in order to avoid the Newspeak later described in 1984. Other essays focus on Gandhi he ”disinfected the political air”, Dickens ”no novelist has shown the same power of entering into the child”s point of view”, Kipling ”a jingo imperialist”, Henry Miller who told Orwell that involvement in the Spanish war was an act of an idiot, and England ”a family with the wrong members in control”.

A Life in Letters

George Orwell was a tireless and lively correspondent. He communicated with family members, friends and newspapers, figures such as Henry Miller, Cyril Connolly, Stephen Spender and Arthur Koestler, and strangers who wrote to him out of the blue. This carefully selected volume of his correspondence provides an eloquent narrative of Orwell’s life, from his schooldays to his final illness. Orwell’s letters afford a unique and fascinating view of his thoughts on matters both personal, political and much in between, from poltergeists, to girls’ school songs and the art of playing croquet. In a note home to his mother from school, he reports having ‘aufel fun after tea’; much later he writes of choosing a pseudonym and smuggling a copy of Ulysses into the country. We catch illuminating glimpses of his family life: his son Richard’s developing teeth, the death of his wife Eileen and his own illness. His talent as a political writer comes to the fore in his descriptions of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, his opinions on bayonets, and on the chaining of German prisoners. And of course, letters to friends and his publisher chart the development and publication of some of the most famous novels in the English language, providing unparalleled insight into his views on his own work and that of his contemporaries. ‘A Life in Letters‘ features previously unpublished material, including letters which shed new light on a love that would haunt him for his whole life, as well as revealing the inspiration for some of his most famous characters. Presented for the first time in a dedicated volume, this selection of Orwell’s letters is an indispensible companion to his diaries.

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