Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation.

First edition of Jeffrey Meyers’s acclaimed full-length biography of George Orwell, the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Octavo, original half cloth, illustrated with photographs. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Megan Wilson. George Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903, was among the most influential writers and political essayists of the twentieth century, a novelist and journalist whose clear-eyed opposition to totalitarianism and injustice gave the language words and ideas that endure, from Big Brother and doublethink to the very adjective Orwellian. His experiences as a colonial policeman in Burma, as a down-and-out in Paris and London, among the poor of industrial England, and as a volunteer wounded in the Spanish Civil War shaped the convictions that run through Homage to Catalonia, The Road to Wigan Pier, and his incomparable essays, culminating in the two books that made him famous the world over, the fable Animal Farm and the dystopia Nineteen Eighty-Four, completed as he was dying of tuberculosis in 1950. Jeffrey Meyers, one of the most prolific literary biographers of his generation and the author of lives of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Conrad, and Katherine Mansfield among many others, draws here on extensive research and interviews to trace Orwell’s difficult and principled life, portraying the man whom V.S. Pritchett famously called the wintry conscience of a generation.…