Orwell : The Life - Hardcover

Taylor, D. J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0701169192 ISBN 13: 9780701169190

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 2003

Synopsis

In the last half-century George Orwell's Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four have sold over 40 million copies. The adjective 'Orwellian' is now a byword for a particular way of thinking about life, literature and language, while Orwell himself has become one of the most potent and symbolic figures in western political thought. Despite this iconic status, Orwell (born Eric Blair) remains an enigma: a passionate democratic socialist steeped in the worst illusions of his Edwardian boyhood, a bitter critic of totalitarianism who concealed a pronounced authoritarian streak, a supporter of social equality who promptly put his adoptive son down for Eton. His progress through the literary world of the 1930s and 40s was characterised by the myths he built around himself. Whether as a reluctant servant of the Raj in 1920s Burma, a mock down-and-out in inter-war England or a Republican volunteer in Spain, he fashioned an image that was often sharply at odds with the real circumstances of his life. Drawing on a mass of previously unseen material, including interviews with friends and people who knew him in his years of obscurity, D. J. Taylor offers a strikingly human portrait of the writer too often embalmed as a secular saint. Here is a man who, for all his outward unworldliness, effectively stage-managed his own life; who combined chilling detachment with warmth and gentleness, disillusionment with hope; who battled through illness to produce two of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century. Moving and revealing, Taylor's Orwell is the biography we have all been waiting for, as vibrant, powerful and resonant as its extraordinary hero.

About this title

About the Author

D. J. Taylor is well-known as a critic, reviewer and novelist- his previous books include After the War- The Novel and England since 1945 , an acclaimed biography, Thackeray, and novels, Trespass and The Comedy Man. He lives in Norwich.

From Publishers Weekly

George Orwell (1903-1950), ne Eric Blair, seemed only a marginal Depression-era writer about disillusion and hopelessness among ordinary working types until the Spanish Civil War, when in 1937 he was shot through the neck and nearly killed, furnishing him with the lens to see totalitarianism and betrayal as, possibly, the future human condition. In his now classic Homage to Catalonia, then a commercial failure, he wrote of papers reporting facts that were lies, patriotism that was propaganda, loyalty that was treachery, heroism that was cowardice. The results, in a bleak career abbreviated at 46 by unremitting tuberculosis, emerged in the dystopian fable Animal Farm and in the mean urban wasteland of 1984, in which history is rewritten daily, and obedience is the only recourse for the brainwashed powerless. Taylor, author of an earlier biography of Thackeray, limns Orwell's life graphically, and relates his early fiction and journalism persuasively to the iconic postwar novels, describing his writing as "an endless scroll constantly refined and brought up to date, in which early entries reemerge to assume an expected resonance." Tendencies to cliche disappear as Taylor warms up to his theme of an Etonian displaced in a remorseless world. A few brief chapters seem merely stuck in, but Orwell's essentially lonely and downstart life, and his triumphs almost too late to matter, make for compelling reading. 16 pages of b&w illus. not seen by PW.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0701169192
• ISBN 13: 9780701169190
• Binding: Hardcover