Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell – The essential backstory to the creation and meaning of George Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of the most important books of the 20th centuryand now the 21st Since its publication more than 70 years ago, George Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four has been regarded as one of the most influential novels of the modern age. Politicians have testified to its influence on their intellectual identities, rock musicians have made records about it, TV viewers watch a reality show named for it, and a White House spokesperson tells of alternative facts. The world we live in is often described as an Orwellian one, awash in inescapable surveillance and invasions of privacy.On Nineteen Eighty-Four dives deep into Orwells life to chart his earlier writings and key moments in his youth, such as his years at a boarding school, whose strict and charismatic headmaster shaped the idea of Big Brother. Taylor tells the story of the writing of the book, taking readers to the Scotland Island of Jura, where Orwell, newly famous thanks to Animal Farm but coping with personal tragedy and rapidly declining health, struggled to finish the novel. Published during the Cold Wara term Orwell coined Taylor elucidates the environmental influences on the book. Then he examines Nineteen Eighty-Fours post-publication life, including its role as a tool to understand our language, politics, and government.In a current climate where truth, surveillance, censorship, and critical thinking are contentious, Orwells work is necessary. Written with resonant and reflective analysis, On Nineteen Eighty-Four is both brilliant and remarkably timely.
Over de auteur
Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist. His work is marked by keen intelligence and wit, a profound awareness of social injustice, an intense opposition to totalitarianism, a passion for clarity in language, and a belief in democratic socialism.In addition to his literary career Orwell served as a police officer with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922-1927 and fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War from 1936-1937. Orwell was severely wounded when he was shot through his throat. Later the organization that he had joined when he joined the Republican cause, The Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), was painted by the pro-Soviet Communists as a Trotskyist organization (Trotsky was Joseph Stalin’s enemy) and disbanded. Orwell and his wife were accused of ‘rabid Trotskyism’ and tried in absentia in Barcelona, along with other leaders of the POUM, in 1938. However by then they had escaped from Spain and returned to England.Between 1941 and 1943, Orwell worked on propaganda for the BBC. In 1943, he became literary editor of the Tribune, a weekly left-wing magazine. He was a prolific polemical journalist, article writer, literary critic, reviewer, poet, and writer of fiction, and, considered perhaps the twentieth century’s best chronicler of English culture.Orwell is best known for the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in 1949) and the satirical novella Animal Farm (1945) they have together sold more copies than any two books by any other twentieth-century author. His 1938 book Homage to Catalonia, an account of his experiences as a volunteer on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War, together with numerous essays on politics, literature, language, and culture, have been widely acclaimed.Orwell’s influence on contemporary culture, popular and political, continues decades after his death. Several of his neologisms, along with the term ‘Orwellian’ now a byword for any oppressive or manipulative social phenomenon opposed to a free society have entered the vernacular.
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