George Orwell

At 46 years old, George Orwell has this physical status:

Literary career and legacy

Orwell's career was best known for his journalism, including essays, studies, columns, journals, and books of reportage (reporting the living conditions of the poor in northern England and class division generally). Homage to Catalonia. Orwell was "the best English essayist since Hazlitt, perhaps since Dr. Johnson," according to Irving Howe.

Orwell's younger readers are increasingly introduced to him as a novelist, particularly because of his extremely popular titles Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The former is often thought to represent stagnation in the Soviet Union following the Russian Revolution and Stalin's emergence; the former, who lived under totalitarian rule. Nineteen Eighty-Four is often compared to Brave New World by Aldous Huxley; both are influential dystopian books that warn of a future where the state machine exerts complete control of social life. The Protheus Award was given to Nineteen Eighty-Four and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 in 1984 for their contributions to dystopian literature. He earned it again in 2011 for Animal Farm. Nineteen Eighty-Four appeared on BBC's The Big Read poll in 2003, with Animal Farm at number 8 and Animal Farm at number 46. Nineteen Eighty-Fourth third in a list of "The best books of the last 125 years" in 2021.

His last book before World War II, Coming Up for Air, his most "English" of his novels, is alarming; images of idyllic Thames-side Edwardian childhood protagonist George Bowling's idyllic childhood are included in his book. The book is pessimistic; industrialism and capitalism have killed Old England's best, and there are still plenty of new external threats. "Old Hitler's something different" is its protagonist George Bowling's argument focuses on Franz Borkenau's totalitarian hypotheses. So's Joe Stalin. They aren't like these chaps from the old days, who crucified people and chopped their heads off and on, just for the fun of it. They're something new—something that hasn't been heard of before."

"The writers I care about most and never grow tired of are Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, Charles Reade, Flaubert, and, among modern writers, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and D. H. Lawrence wrote in an autobiographical essay sent by Orwell to the editors of Twentieth Century Authors in 1940. However, I think the modern writer who has inspired me the most is W. Somerset Maugham, who I adore greatly for his ability to tell a tale clearly and without frills." Orwell praised Jack London's book The Road in particular. Orwell's poverty in The Road to Wigan Pier closely resembles that of Jack London's The People of the Abyss, in which the American journalist disguised himself as an out-of-work sailor to investigate the lives of the poor in London. "Politics vs. s. Gulliver's Travels (1946) Orwell wrote: "I would certainly make a list of six books that were to be preserved if none of them were destroyed, but Gulliver's Travels would be included among them." "The minds of many of us, and therefore the physical world, would be quite different if Wells had never existed," he said.

Orwell was an Arthur Koestler fan and became a close friend during the three years that Koestler and his wife Mamain spent at Bwlch Ocyn, a secluded farmhouse that belonged to Clough Williams-Ellis, in the Vale of Ffestiniog. In 1941, Orwell wrote a book about Koestler's Darkness at Noon for the New Statesman.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Gissing, Graham Greene, Herman Melville, Henry Miller, Tobias Smollett, Joseph Conrad, and Yevgeny Zamyatin were among Orwell's favorite writers. He praised Kipling as a "spurious" and "morally insensitive and visually disgusting writer," but he was also a critic of Rudyard Kipling, who was praised as a "good bad poet" whose work is "spurious" and "aesthetically disgusting," but he was also able to relate to certain aspects of reality more accurately than more enlightened writers. He had a similar ambivalent reaction to G. K. Chesterton, who devoted himself to "Roman Catholicism," and Evelyn Waugh, who was criticized as "ab[ou]t as good a novelist as one can be," he wrote. "As novelists go" today, they have a critical outlook."

Orwell has always promoted himself as a book reviewer throughout his life. His books are well-known and have a lot of influence on literary criticism. In the concluding to his 1940 essay on Charles Dickens, he wrote a letter.

Orwell, according to George Woodcock, the last two sentences also describe Orwell.

Orwell wrote a review of George Bernard Shaw's play Arms and the Man. Shaw considered this Shaw's best play and that it is likely to remain socially relevant due to the fact that war is not, essentially speaking, a glorious romantic journey. In Defense of P.G., 1945's essay In Defense of P.G. Wodehouse's book is accompanied by a witty review of his writing, as well as the fact that his radio broadcasts from Germany (during the war) did not really make him a traitor. Wodehouse's activities were debunked by the Ministry of Information, according to him.

The British Council commissioned Orwell to write an article on British food in 1946 as part of a campaign to foster British relations abroad. Orwell's book titled British Cookery described the British diet as a "simple, robust, perhaps marginal diet" and in which "hot drinks are acceptable at any hour of the day. "This is not a snack but a serious meal," he addresses in the United Kingdom's breakfast ritual. The time at which people have their breakfast is determined of course by the time they get to work. High tea in the United Kingdom consisted of a variety of savory and sweet dishes, but "no tea will be considered a good one if it did not include at least one kind of cake," he said, "as well as cakes and biscuits are commonly eaten at tea time." Orwell also included a recipe for marmalade, a common British spread on bread. The British Council, on the other hand, refused to publish the paper on the grounds that writing about food at a time when strict rationing was not feasible in the United Kingdom. The essay was discovered in the British Council's archives in 2019, as well as the rejection letter. Orwell's official apology for the commissioned essay's rejection was released by the British Council.

Orwell's "uncompromising intellectual honesty made him appear almost inhuman at times," Arthur Koestler said. "Orwell's writing pierced intellectual hypocrisy wherever he looked." "Orwell, the saint of common decency who would have in earlier days," his BBC boss Rushbrook Williams said, "have either canonized or burned at the stake." Orwell is described as a "successful impersonation of a plain man who stumbles into action in a nonmediated way and shares the truth about it," Raymond Williams writes in Politics and Letters. Orwell's "homespun empiricist" outlook, assuming that the truth was only there to be told in a clear and concrete manner, is now seeming not to be purely ignorant but culpably self-deluding. Orwell has been dubbed an enemy of the Left by American scholar Scott Lucas. Despite Orwell's insistence that they were not," John Newsinger has argued that Lucas could only do this by presenting "all of Orwell's attacks on Stalinism [–] as if they were crimes against socialism [–]

Orwell's work has earned a central position in England's school literature curriculum, with Animal Farm as a regular examination topic at the end of secondary education (GCSE), and Nineteen Eighty-Four being a subject for subsequent examinations below university level (A Levels). Animal Farm was ranked as the nation's most popular textbook from school in a 2016 UK survey.

In May 2015, Orwell's birthplace, a bungalow in Motihari, Bihar, India, was opened as a museum.

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