Fifty Essays
George Orwell
Fifty Essays
Fifty of Orwell's essays, from "A Hanging" and "Shooting an Elephant" to "Politics and the English Language", "Why I Write" and "Such, Such Were the Joys".
About the book
Fifty Essays gathers George Orwell's shorter prose from across his career, from The Spike and A Hanging in the early 1930s to Writers and Leviathan and Reflections on Gandhi at the end of the 1940s. The collection includes his reports on poverty and empire, his writing on the Spanish Civil War, and his studies of writers from Dickens and Kipling to Yeats, Swift and Tolstoy. It also contains the essays that did most to fix his reputation as a critic of politics and language, among them Shooting an Elephant, Notes on Nationalism, Politics and the English Language and Why I Write. Beside them are lighter pieces on boys' weeklies, seaside postcards, English murders and how to make a nice cup of tea.
About the author
George Orwell (1903–1950) was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, an English novelist and essayist who turned plain, exact prose into a political act. Born in India and schooled at Eton, he served five years in the imperial police in Burma, then lived among the poor of Paris and London, and was shot through the throat fighting Franco's forces in Spain — and each of those became a book. He wanted prose to be "like a window pane", and distrusted any language built to hide what it meant. Animal Farm made him famous; Nineteen Eighty-Four, finished on a Scottish island while tuberculosis was killing him, gave the world Big Brother and doublethink. His work also includes Burmese Days, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia.