Orwell: The Life - Hardcover

Taylor, D. J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805074732 ISBN 13: 9780805074734

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co., 2003

Synopsis

At last, a fresh, comprehensive biography of the twentieth century's most emblematic writer

In the last fifty years, Animal Farm and 1984 have sold over forty million copies, and "Orwellian" is now a byword for a particular way of thinking about life, literature, and language. D. J. Taylor's magisterial assessment cuts through George Orwell's iconic status to reveal a bitter critic who concealed a profound totalitarian streak and whose progress through the literary world of the 1930s and 1940s was characterized by the myths he built around himself. But whether as reluctant servant of the Raj in 1920s Burma, mock down-and-outer in Paris and London, or Spanish Civil War soldier, the circumstances of his life are sharply at odds with the image Orwell so effectively stage-managed.

Drawing on previously unseen material, Orwell is a strikingly human portrait of the writer too often embalmed as a secular saint. This is the biography we have been waiting for-as vibrant, powerful, and resonant as its extraordinary subject.

About this title

About the Author

D. J. Taylor's acclaimed biography, Thackeray , was selected as a "book of the year" by Victoria Glendinning and A. N. Wilson. Taylor lives in Norwich, England.

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0805074732
• ISBN 13: 9780805074734
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 480