Works by
George Orwell
(aka Eric Arthur Blair)
(Writer)
[1903 - 1950]

Biographical

• Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
  This unusual fictional account, in good part autobiographical, narrates without self-pity and often with humor the adventures of a penniless British writer among the down-and-out of two great cities. In the tales of both cities we learn some sobering Orwellian truths about poverty and society.

• The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)
  In the 1930s Orwell was sent by a socialist book club to investigate the appalling mass unemployment in the industrial north of England. He went beyond his assignment to investigate the employed as well-”to see the most typical section of the English working class.”

• Homage to Catalonia (1938)
  In 1936 Orwell went to Spain to report on the Civil War and instead joined the fight against the Fascists. This famous account describes the war and Orwell’s experiences.

• Why I Write (2004)

Collections

• The Orwell Reader: Fiction, Essays, and Reportage (1956)

• The Collected Essays, Journalism & Letters (1968), Ian Angus and Sonia Orwell, eds.

  • George Orwell: An Age Like This, 1920-1940

  • My Country Right or Left, 1940-1943

  • George Orwell: As I Please, 1943-1945

  • In Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950

Essays

• Critical Essays (1946)

• The Lion and the Unicorn (1946)

• Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays (1953)

• A Collection of Essays (1954)
  In this bestselling compilation of essays, written in the clear-eyed, uncompromising language for which he is famous, Orwell discusses with vigor such diverse subjects as his boyhood schooling, the Spanish Civil War, Henry Miller, British imperialism, and the profession of writing.

• Inside the Whale and Other Essays (1957)

• Selected Essays including The Prevention of Literature, England Your England, Inside the Whale, Down the Mine, Boys' Weeklies, Shooting Elephants and Others (1957)

• Dickens, Dali and Others (1986)
  Ten celebrated essays by a man universally regarded as a master of the essay form. Included are such classics as "Charles Dickens," "The Art of Donald McGill," "Boys' Weeklies," "Raffles and Miss Blandish," and "Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali."

• Essays (2002)

Fiction

• Burmese Days:  A Novel (1934)

• A Clergyman's Daughter (1935)
  Dorothy Hare, the clergyman's daughter of this title, grows up subservient to her tyrannical father. But submission has its limit and Dorothy rebels, or at least her psyche does. She blacks out and reappears as a vagrant amnesiac whose adventures show us life, such as it is, from the underside.

• Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)
  Gordon Comstock is a poor young man who works in a grubby London bookstore and spends his evenings shivering in a rented room, trying to write. He is determined to stay free of the “money world” of lucrative jobs, family responsibilities, and the kind of security symbolized by the homely aspidistra plant that sits in every middle-class British window.
  Movie: A Merry War (1998), Robert Bierman, director with Harriet Walter, Helena Bonham Carter,  Jim Carter, and Richard E. Grant  DVD  VHS

• Coming Up for Air (1939)
  Coming Up for Air is about coping. Orwell hooks a character from among the struggling middle class and, close-up, lets us watch him wiggle. George (Tubby) Bowling is a "fat, middle-aged bloke with false teeth and a red face." He sells insurance, a task at which he grimly excels. The father of two ingrates and husband to a slattern, he dutifully makes mortgage payments on their dreary home. As the years roll by, he comes to feel like a hostage to his family. He regards them as wardens, himself a prisoner.

• Animal Farm (1945)
  George Orwell's classic satire of the Russian Revolution is an intimate part of our contemporary culture. It is an account of the bold struggle that transforms Mr. Jones's Manor Farm into Animal Farm, a wholly democratic society built on the credo that All Animals Are Created Equal. Out of their cleverness, the pigs Napoleon, Squealer, and Snowball emerge as leaders of the new community in a subtle evolution that bears an insidious familiarity. The climax is the brutal betrayal of the faithful horse Boxer, when totalitarian rule is reestablished with the bloodstained postscript to the founding slogan: But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others.
  Movie (Animated): 1955, Joy Batchelor, director with John Halas  DVD VHS
  Movie: 1999, John Stephensen, director with Julia Ormond and Kelsey Grammer  DVD VHS

• Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel (1949)
  Thought Police. Big Brother. Orwellian. These words have entered our vocabulary because of George Orwell's classic dystopian novel, Nineteen Eight-Four. The story of one man's nightmare odyssey as he pursues a forbidden love affair through a world ruled by warring states and a power structure that controls not only information but also individual thought and memory, 1984 is a prophetic, haunting tale.
  Movie: 1955, Michael Anderson, director with David Kossoff, Edmund O'Brien, Jan Sterling, and Michael Redgrave  DVD  VHS
  Movie 1984, Michael Radford, director with Cyril Cusack, John Hurt, Richard Burton, and Suzanna Hamilton   DVD   VHS

• James Burnham and The Managerial Revolution (1946)

• The English People (1947)
  Orwell contributed his views of the English people for this short work. Includes eight colour plates and seventeen illustrations in black and white.

• Orwell: The War Broadcasts (1985)

• Orwell for Beginners (1984) by David N. Smith with Michael Mosher, Illustrator
  Animal Farm, steeped in scathing commentary about communism and the Russian Revolution, as well as 1984, a ferocious parody of the totalitarian state, are masterpieces of literature and social thought. This insightful book shows that contrary to popular opinion, author George Orwell was actually a passionate socialist. It recounts events that influenced his work, including his experiences as a left-wing journalist and soldier in the Spanish Civil War.

• Critical Essays on George Orwell (1986),  Bernard Oldsey and Joseph Browne, eds.

• Why Orwell Matters (2002) by Christopher Hitchens
  In a true marriage of minds, Christopher Hitchens takes on George Orwell and the value of one of the twentieth century's great independent thinkers. In this brilliant and contemplative biographical essay, Christopher Hitchens assesses the life, the achievement, and the myth of the great political writer and participant George Orwell. The result is the perfect convergence of two kindred spirits. Hitchens has long regarded Orwell as a mentor and model, and in true emulative and contrarian style, he is both adulatory and aggressive, sympathetic yet critical, taking true measure of his subject as hero and as problem.
  
  Combining the best of Hitchens's polemical punch and intellectual elegance in a tightly woven and subtle argument, Why Orwell Matters tears down the façade of sainthood erected by hagiographers and probes deeper to find the true George Orwell: gifted, flawed, and human. With lyrical and allusive prose, Hitchens examines Orwell and his perspectives on fascism, empire, feminism, and Englishness, as well as his outlook on America, a country and culture toward which he exhibited little curiosity but much ambivalence.
  
  With his characteristic wit, Christopher Hitchens has written a book that addresses not only why Orwell matters today but how he will continue to matter in a future, uncertain world.

• George Orwell (2003) by Gordon Bowker
  Few writers can boast the brilliant legacy of George Orwell, both in his contributions to the English language—Big Brother, Newspeak, Doublethink—and his profound influence on world literature. In George Orwell, Gordon Bowker gives us the man behind the words: his early childhood and schooling at Eton; his deliberate plunge into poverty; his experiences in the Spanish Civil War; his complex, sometimes reckless sex life; and the extraordinary success of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Meticulously researched, this is the most fully realized account yet of this pivotal literary figure.

• Finding George Orwell in Burma (2005) by Emma Larkin
  Over the years the American writer Emma Larkin has spent traveling in Burma, she's come to know all too well the many ways this brutal police state can be described as "Orwellian." The life of the mind exists in a state of siege in Burma, and it long has. But Burma's connection to George Orwell is not merely metaphorical; it is much deeper and more real. Orwell's mother was born in Burma, at the height of the British raj, and Orwell was fundamentally shaped by his experiences in Burma as a young man working for the British Imperial Police. When Orwell died, the novel-in-progress on his desk was set in Burma. It is the place George Orwell's work holds in Burma today, however, that most struck Emma Larkin. She was frequently told by Burmese acquaintances that Orwell did not write one book about their country--his first novel, Burmese Days--but in fact he wrote three, the "trilogy" that included Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. When Larkin quietly asked one Burmese intellectual if he knew the work of George Orwell, he stared blankly for a moment and then said, "Ah, you mean the prophet!"
  
  In one of the most intrepid political travelogues in recent memory, Emma Larkin tells of the year she spent traveling through Burma using the life and work of George Orwell as her compass. Going from Mandalay and Rangoon to poor delta backwaters and up to the old hill-station towns in the mountains of Burma's far north, Larkin visits the places where Orwell worked and lived, and the places his books live still. She brings to vivid life a country and a people cut off from the rest of the world, and from one another, by the ruling military junta and its vast network of spies and informers. Using Orwell enables her to show, effortlessly, the weight of the colonial experience on Burma today, the ghosts of which are invisible and everywhere. More important, she finds that the path she charts leads her to the people who have found ways to somehow resist the soul-crushing effects of life in this most cruel police state. And George Orwell's moral clarity, hatred of injustice, and keen powers of observation serve as the author's compass in another sense too: they are qualities she shares and they suffuse her book--the keenest and finest reckoning with life in this police state that has yet been written.
  
  A brave and revelatory reconnaissance of modern Burma, one of the world's grimmest and most shuttered police states, using as its compass the life and work of George Orwell, the man many in Burma call simply "the prophet".

• Every Intellectual's Big Brother (2006) by John Rodden
  George Orwell has been embraced, adopted, and co-opted by everyone from the far left to the neoconservatives. Each succeeding generation of Anglo-American intellectuals has felt compelled to engage the life, work, and cultural afterlife of Orwell, who is considered by many to have been the foremost political writer of the twentieth century. Every Intellectual's Big Brother explores the ways in which numerous disparate groups, Orwell's intellectual "siblings," have adapted their views of Orwell to fit their own agendas and how in doing so they have changed our perceptions of Orwell himself. By examining the politics of literary reception as a dimension of cultural history, John Rodden gives us a better understanding of Orwell's unique and enduring role in Anglo-American intellectual life.
  
  In Part One, Rodden opens the book with a section titled "Their Orwell, Left and Right," which focuses on Orwell's reception by several important literary circles of the latter half of the twentieth century. Beginning with Orwell's own contemporaries, Rodden addresses the ways various intellectual groups of the 1950s responded to Orwell. Rodden then moves on in Part Two to what he calls the "Orwell Confraternity Today," those contemporary intellectuals who have, in various ways, identified themselves with or reacted against Orwell. The author concludes by examining how Orwell's status as an object of admiration and detraction has complicated the way in which he has been perceived by readers since his death.

• The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell (2007 release), John Rodden, ed.
  George Orwell is regarded as the greatest political writer in English of the twentieth century. The massive critical literature on Orwell has not only become extremely specialized, and therefore somewhat inaccessible to the non-scholar, but it has also attributed to and even created misconceptions about the man, the writer and his literary legacy. For these reasons, an overview of Orwell's writing and influence is an indispensable resource. Accordingly, this Companion serves as both an introduction to Orwell's work and furnishes numerous innovative interpretations and fresh critical perspectives on it. Throughout the Companion, which includes chapters dedicated to two of Orwell's major novels, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, Orwell's work is placed within the context of the political and social climate of the time. His response to the Depression, British imperialism, Stalinism, World War II, and the politics of the British Left are also examined.