Book description
Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of
Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of
the Party. Yet he inwardly rebels against the totalitarian world he
lives in, which demands absolute obedience and controls him through
the all-seeing telescreens and the watchful eye of Big Brother,
symbolic head of the Party. In his longing for truth and liberty,
Smith begins a secret love affair with a fellow-worker Julia, but soon
discovers the true price of freedom is betrayal.
Contains an introduction by Thomas Pynchon, as well as an
accompanying appendix and explanatory footnotes.
Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) was born in 1903 in India, where
his father worked for the Civil Service. The family moved to England in
1907 and in 1917 Orwell entered Eton, where he contributed regularly to
the various college magazines. From 1922 to 1927 he served with the
Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that inspired his first
novel,
Burmese Days
(1934). Several years of poverty followed. He lived in Paris for two
years before returning to England, where he worked successively as a
private tutor, schoolteacher and bookshop assistant, and contributed
reviews and articles to a number of periodicals.
Down and Out in
Paris and London
was published in 1933. In 1936 he was commissioned by Victor Gollancz
to visit areas of mass unemployment in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and
The Road to Wigan Pier
(1937) is a powerful description of the poverty he saw there. At the
end of 1936 Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Republicans and was
wounded.
Homage to Catalonia
is his account of the civil war. He was admitted to a sanatorium in
1938 and from then on was never fully fit. He spent six months in
Morocco and there wrote
Coming Up for Air
. During the Second World War he served in the Home Guard and worked for
the BBC Eastern Service from 1941 to 1943. As literary editor of the
Tribune
he contributed a regular page of political and literary commentary, and
he also wrote for the
Observer
and later for the
Manchester Evening News
. His unique political allegory,
Animal Farm
was published in 1945, and it was this novel, together with
Nineteen Eighty-Four
(1949), which brought him world-wide fame.
