GEORGE ORWELL

Reexamining Orwell “in a time of peak Orwell.”

Colls, former professor of English history at the University of Leicester and author of George Orwell: English Rebel (2014), notes that Orwell wrote essays, journalism, reviews, and polemics as well as novels that have given him a glamorous “mystique, a ‘cool’ more often bestowed on rock stars than writers.” Born in a middle-class family, he received a scholarship to Eton but skipped the university to join the Indian Imperial Police, where he served five years before returning to England in 1928 to become a writer. After hardscrabble years in London and Paris, he published several well-received novels and earned a living as a freelancer. He traveled to Spain in 1936 to fight for the Republicans and survived a sniper’s bullet, but the organization that recruited his unit did not owe loyalty to Stalin, who proclaimed them fascist plotters, and Orwell barely escaped with his life. By the outbreak of World War II, Orwell was making a living as a writer and spent several years with the BBC. Published in 1945, his novel Animal Farm was a bestseller and made him famous. In 1949, 1984 was also a hit, but by that time he was seriously ill with tuberculosis, dying in 1950. Colls likens the novel to “a boot stamping on the human imagination forever.” Orwell was a brilliant writer as well as a polemicist. Perhaps his greatest essay is Shooting an Elephant. “I’ve had students who wept in class” when reading the essay, writes Colls. Orwell’s fierce contempt for fellow leftist intellectuals who fawned over Stalin and the Soviet Union has won him admiration from conservatives who overlook his lifelong socialism. Colls’ biography is essential reading at a time when democracies around the world are once again in danger.

A short, splendid biography of a man who wrote superbly about totalitarianism.