America's View of George Orwell

Extract

It is now almost a third of a century since George Orwell's publication of Animal Farm made him famous in the United States. Outside of certain radical and literary circles Orwell was virtually unknown in America before 1946. He had written an occasional piece for journals like the New Republic, Dwight Macdonald's idiosyncratic Politics, plus a series of “London Letters” for Philip Rahv's radical magazine, Partisan Review. In the early 1930's Harper's had published some of his earlier works, novels like A Clergyman's Daughter and Burmese Days, and non-fiction pieces like Down and Out in Paris and London. They were largely ignored, unread, and unreviewed.