Introduction

Summary

Just days before he died in January 1950, George Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903) penned in his notebook one of the epigrams that typified his stylistic talents: “After 50, everyone has the face he deserves.” Unfortunately, he never lived to fifty. He died at age forty-six, on the threshold of becoming “a famous author,” his boyhood dream. In the years since his death his fame has only grown.

Orwell’s active literary life spanned less than two decades and yet he became perhaps the best-known English literary figure of the first half of the twentieth century. As he declared in “Why I Write” (1946), Orwell aspired to raise “political writing into an art.” In his greatest essays and his two final masterpieces, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), he succeeded. In a poll done by Waterstone’s, the English bookstore chain, readers ranked Orwell’s last two works as the second and third most influential books of the twentieth century. (J. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings cycle came in first.)