Also great:
• Homage to Catalonia (1938)
Animal Farm is a work I include on the list of greatest works only under protest. It's not that I dislike Orwell. I like most of his work very much. Nor do I consider Animal.... more
This book had the fortune to be acclaimed by two usually opposed groups—the right wing and the left wing in the West. The former saw it as a denunciation of collectivism in all its forms while.... more
There are two George Orwells.
The one who became posthumously famous for producing the speculative works Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, giving the adjective "Orwellian" to totalitarian societies.
And the George Orwell who wrote gritty accounts of real life in journalism and fiction for much of his life. These earlier works were little-known by the public during his lifetime but have become influential works of literature and political thought since his death.
Orwell's life was full of other seeming paradoxes.
Born Eric Arthur Blair in India to members of the Indian Civil Service, he was educated at Eton in Britain. He served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922 to 1927 before leaving to live in England and France in self-imposed poverty.
His first journalistic book, Down and and Out in Paris and London (1933), is an engrossing account of his experience living among tramps, while his first novel Burmese Days (1934) hearkens back to his earlier life as a policeman.
As a socialist, he joined the republican forces in the Spanish Civil War where he was wounded in 1936. But his autobiographical account of this conflict, Homage to Catalonia (1938), criticizes the communists. He became identified more as an anarchist—opposing centralized rule by any party.
His next non-fictional book, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), continues his story of impoverished life in Britain in a sympathetic study of the lives of miners in the Lancashire town of Wigan.
Three more novels published in the 1930s include A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), and Coming Up for Air (1939).
He also produced much journalism in the remaining two decades of his short life, one of the most influential articles being the essay "Politics and the English Language" (1950) which associates authoritarianism with linguistic decay. The pieces have been collected in Dickens, Dali and Others (1946), Shooting an Elephant (1950) and the four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell (1968).
But his most popular works were published in his last few years. Animal Farm (1945) is a fable in which animals take over a farm and establish a regime that turns from egalitarianism to oligarchy—a satire on Stalinism. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is one of the best-known novels of the twentieth century, as even people who have never read it know that it warns of a centralized society run by Big Brother.
In the anti-red 1950s these works were heralded as attacks on socialism, but before he died Orwell denied this:
"My recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable and which have already been partly realized in communism and Fascism. I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive. I believe also that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences."
Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell
Yet the two books together are the twentieth century's biggest sellers for a contemporary author. And nearly all of them have been flogged, and even assigned in high schools, as anti-collectivist, pro-individualist screeds in the vein of Ayn Rand.
But in order to appreciate Orwell's writing, it's really not important whether you agree or disagree with either Orwell's presumed political message or his actual political views. Rather, remember his focus really is on the experience of the person within whatever social milieu he is depicting—from the hobo communities of Europe to the British mineworkers to imagined future generations living under totalitarian rule. Yes, he was always political and—in my view—not always correct, but the motivation for political analysis was maintenance and improvement of ordinary lives.
In his brief life he produced a huge body of work to this end.
Twenty volumes of his Complete Works were published in 1998.
— Eric
