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George Orwell

George Orwell

  • One of the most celebrated classics of the twentieth century, this cautionary tale of a man trapped under the gaze of an authoritarian state is more relevant now than ever before.

    “Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.”

    Winston Smith works in the Ministry of Truth—or Minitrue as it is called in Newspeak—where he alters newspapers and reports to follow the arbitrary dictates of Big Brother’s propaganda. Beneath his outward conformity, however, Winston dreams of sharing his treasonable thoughts andbreaking through the loneliness in which he lives.

    Thus he takes his first dangerous steps, writing a diary of his doubts and then falling in love with a woman of the Party, the beautiful and brave Julia. They know their love is doomed, but Julia says, “They can make you say anything—anything—but they can’t make you believe it.”

    But in Oceania, there is no possibility of solidarity, rebellion, or love—and the Party can reach anywhere.

    First published in 1949, this disturbing novel that George Orwell wrote during a time of great social and political unrest centers on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and repressive regimentation of people and behaviors within society.

    This classic of dystopian fiction contributed new words that became part of common English usage, including Big Brother, doublethink, newspeak, and thoughtcrime. The adjective "Orwellian" has come to mean government deception, surveillance, and misleading terminology.

    Cover illustration & Design by Derek Anderson and Joel Anderson. © Anderson Design Group, Inc. All rights reserved. Licensed by Anderson Design Group.

  • The articles collected in George Orwell’s Essays illuminate the life and work of one of the most individual writers of this century—a man who elevated political writing to an art. This outstanding collection brings together Orwell’s longer, major essays and a fine selection of shorter pieces that includes “My Country Right or Left,” “Decline of the English Murder,” “Shooting an Elephant,” and “A Hanging.”

    With great originality and wit, Orwell unfolds his views on subjects ranging from a revaluation of Charles Dickens to the nature of Socialism, from a comic yet profound discussion of naughty seaside postcards to a spirited defense of English cooking. Displaying an almost unrivalled mastery of English plain prose, Orwell’s essays created a unique literary manner from the process of thinking aloud and continue to challenge, move, and entertain.

  • Gordon Comstock is a poor young man who works by day in a grubby London bookstore and spends his evenings shivering in a rented room, trying to write. Gordon has published a slim volume of verse and is determined to keep free of the “money world” of safe, lucrative jobs, marriage, and family responsibilities. This world, to Gordon, spells the end of art and aspidistra, the homely, indestructible house plant that stands in every middle-class British window.

    Gordon’s sweetheart, Rosemary, understands him: she is patient with his pride and lack of funds. But then, as it happens with all lovers, events overtake them.

    Orwell’s picture of the “money world,” as Gordon sees it, is in his best satirical vein.

  • George Bowling, an insurance salesman, hits middle age and feels impelled to "come up for air" from his life of quiet desperation. With seventeen pounds he has won at a race, he steals a vacation from his wife and his family and pays a visit to Lower Binfield, the village where he grew up, to fish for carp in a pool he remembers from thirty years before. But the pool is gone, Lower Binfield has changed beyond recognition, and the principal event of Bowling's holiday is an accidental bombing by the RAF.

    Bowling's everyman life is also a sort of cavalcade of England from 1893 to 1938. Written when the clouds of World War II were already gathering, this story of Bowling's journey into his own and his country's past is told with humor, warmth, and nostalgia which will surprise and delight George Orwell's many readers.

  • When Orwell went to the north of England in the thirties to find out how industrial workers lived, he not only observed but shared in their experience. He stayed in cramped, dreary lodgings and subsisted on the scant, cheerless diet of the poor. He went down into the coal mines and walked crouching, as the miners did, through a one- to three-mile passage too low to stand up in. He watched the back-breaking, dangerous labor of men whose net pay then averaged $575 a year. And he knew the unemployed, those who had been out of work for so long they had sunk beyond despair into an inhuman apathy.

    In his searing yet beautiful account of life on the bottom rung, Orwell asks himself why socialism—which alone, he felt, could conserve human values from the ravages of industrialism—had so little appeal. His answer was a harsh critique of the socialism and socialists of his time.

  • Colonial politics in 1930 Kyauktada, India, come to a head when the European Club, previously for whites only, is ordered to elect one token native member. The deeply racist members do their best to manipulate the situation, resulting in the loss not only of reputations, but of lives.

    Amidst this cynical setting, timber merchant James Flory stands as a bridge between the warring factions, a Brit with a genuine appreciation for the native people and culture. But he has trouble acting on his feelings, and the significance of his vote, both social and political, weighs on him. When Elizabeth Lackersteen arrives, blonde, eligible, and anti-intellectual, Flory finds himself the hapless suitor.

    Orwell alternates between grand-scale political intrigue and nuanced social interaction, mining his own Colonial Indian heritage to create a monument of historical fiction.

  • 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").

  • Orwell's own experiences inspire this semi-autobiographical novel about a penniless man living in Paris in the early 1930s. The narrator's poverty brings him into contact with strange incidents and characters, which he manages to chronicle with great 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 classes 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.

  • In 1936, George Orwell went to Spain to report on the civil war and instead joined the POUM militia to fight against the Fascists.

    In this now justly famous account of his experience, he describes both the bleak and the comic aspects of trench warfare on the Aragon front, the Barcelona uprising in May 1937, his nearly fatal wounding just two weeks later, and his escape from Barcelona into France after the Party of Maxist Unification (POUM) was suppressed.

    As important as the story of the war itself is Orwell’s analysis of why the Communist Party sabotaged the workers’ revolution and branded the POUM as Trotskyist, which provides an essential key to understanding the outcome of the war and an ironic sidelight on international Communism.

    It was during this period in Spain that Orwell learned for himself the nature of totalitarianism in practice, an education that laid the groundwork for his great books Animal Farm and 1984.

  • George Orwell’s classic satire of the Russian Revolution has become an intimate part of our contemporary culture, with its treatment of democratic, fascist, and socialist ideals through an animal fable.

    The animals of Mr. Jones’s Manor Farm are overworked, mistreated, and desperately seeking a reprieve. In their quest to create an idyllic society where justice and equality reign, the animals of Manor Farm revolt against their human rulers, establishing the democratic Animal Farm under the credo, “All Animals Are Created Equal.” Out of their cleverness, the pigs—Napoleon, Squealer, and Snowball—emerge as leaders of the new community. In a development of insidious familiarity, the pigs begin to assume ever greater amounts of power, while other animals, especially the faithful horse Boxer, assume more of the work. The climax of the story results in a brutal betrayal, when totalitarian rule is reestablished with the bloodstained postscript to the founding slogan: “But Some Animals Are More Equal than Others.”

    This astonishing allegory, one of the most scathing satires in literary history, remains as fresh and relevant as the day it was published.

  • Dorothy Hare, the dutiful daughter of a rector in Suffolk, spends her days performing good works and cultivating good thoughts, pricking her arm with a pin when a bad thought arises. She does her best to reconcile her father’s fanciful view of his position in the world with such realities as the butcher’s bill. But even Dorothy’s strength has its limits, and one night, as she works feverishly on costumes for the church-school play, she blacks out. When she comes to, she finds herself on a London street, clad in a sleazy dress and unaware of her identity. After a series of degrading adventures—picking hops in Kent, sleeping among the down-and-outers in Trafalgar Square, spending a night in jail, and teaching in a grubby day school for girls—she is rescued. But although she regains her life as a clergyman’s daughter, she has lost her faith.