Preface

Since his death in January 1950 at the age of forty-six, George Orwell’s critical and popular reputation has ascended and spread wings. Three major biographies were published during the last decade and Orwell’s papers have been edited in twenty volumes by the British scholar Peter Davison. Special studies dealing with Orwell’s career and writings appear annually.

Recognized internationally chiefly for his last two masterpieces – Animal Farm (1945), his brilliant satire on the Russian Revolution, and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), his gripping dystopian portrait of the future – Orwell’s other body of writing also enjoys an appreciative audience today.

Our study examines the reasons for Orwell’s ongoing appeal. Combining biography with an analysis of his writings, we focus on the main literary genres in which Orwell wrote: his traditional novels, his essays, and his documentary journalism.

In the 1930s, Orwell struggled to write realistic fiction. Two of his novels in particular, Burmese Days and Coming Up for Air, exhibit skillfully developed characters and descriptive passages even as they reveal the limitations of his fictional imagination.

Orwell’s essays are among his best writing. He took a format that was being swamped by belles-lettres and breathed new life into it. In his greatest essays – “A Hanging,” “Shooting an Elephant,” and “Politics and the English Language” – Orwell discovered settings and subject matters that suited the prose style that he had developed: clear, direct, pared of artifice. By writing about topics avoided by serious authors (comic postcards, murder mysteries, and other mundane everyday things), Orwell also helped create the genre of popular cultural studies.