GEORGE ORWELL

A concise account of a tireless political writer’s adventures and education.

The publication of Orwell’s novel 1984 serves as the endpoint for this pocket biography, insofar as everything in the writer’s rich life seems to have contributed to that masterpiece. Agathocleous (English/Rutgers) argues that Orwell’s status as a scholarship boy at Eton awakened his sense of class consciousness early on. Working in the Imperial Police in Burma introduced him to the injustices of colonialism. Posing as a derelict in London and Paris, he began his literary career as a participatory journalist, seeing first-hand the economic failures of the prosperous West. These stories are well known, of course, and the author does not add much to them. Chapters devoted to Orwell’s experience in the Spanish Civil War and as a BBC correspondent in London during WWII are more informative: Orwell was frustrated by the censors and the bureaucrats of the BBC, and these lesser difficulties compared unfavorably with his charged, egalitarian experiences in Spain (where he fought bravely and suffered injuries). Eventually he quit the BBC to write for leftist journals and engage in the political infighting of the day, bucking popular opinion—and elite dogma—in his criticisms of the USSR. In due time that struggle bore fruit: in 1945 he published his fable Animal Farm, a manifesto against the abuse of political power that was also his first critical and financial success. Three years later, with the war over and Stalin by then perceived as an enemy, he wrote 1984 while ensconced on a Scottish island, bedridden and dying from tuberculosis. Details of Orwell’s family life are given throughout, but his literary exploits crowd them out. Recent charges that Orwell denounced friends and colleagues to the British authorities as communist sympathizers are given scant attention, however, and may prompt frustrated readers to wonder why a longer consideration of this topic was omitted.

An excellent introduction for laymen and students of literature.