Age Like This, 1920-1940 (v. 1) (George Orwell: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters) - Softcover

Orwell, George

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1567921337 ISBN 13: 9781567921335

Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher Inc, 2004

Synopsis

Essays, journalism and essays by the indispensable George Orwell, spanning the first two decades of his writing career. Even many years after his death, the more we read of Orwell, the more clearly we can think about our world and ourselves.

Orwell's breadth of experience, compassion, and political insight make his early essays among his best. Here he witnesses two kinds of executions in Burma ("A Hanging" and "Shooting an Elephant"), fires salvos at British colonialism ("How a Nation is Exploited"), copes with poverty in Paris ("A Day in the Life of a Tramp"), and works in a bookshop in Hampstead ("Bookshop Memories").

It was also during this period that Orwell wrote and published Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier (originally published for the Left Book Club), and the memoir of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia.

This first volume of the Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters contains some of the most remarkable writing of Orwell's entire career and will be enjoyed by anyone who believes that words can go a long way toward changing the world.

About this title

About the Authors

George Orwell is widely considered one of the greatest writers of the past century. Although his novels 1984 and Animal Farm are now the most widely-read of his works, Orwell was primarily a nonfiction writer. The occasionally radical political content in his essays, memoirs, and journalistic works brought him some censure during his life, but they now make up one of the most celebrated bodies of work in the English language.

Sonia Brownell Orwell, as a young woman, was responsible for transcribing and editing the copy text for the first edition of the Winchester Malory as assistant to the eminent medievalist at Manchester University, Eugene Vinaver. Brownell first met Orwell when she worked as the assistant to Cyril Connolly, a friend of his from Eton College, at the literary magazine Horizon. The two were married in October 1949, only three months before Orwell's death from tuberculosis.

Ian Angus, a widely recognized Orwell scholar for decades, helped establish the Orwell Archive at University College, London and, in 1968, worked with Sonia Orwell in editing Orwell's Collected Journalism, Essays and Letters published by Secker & Warburg in England.

From the Back Cover

Considering that much of his life was spent in poverty and ill health, it is something of a miracle that in only forty-six years George Orwell managed to publish ten books and two collections of essays. Here, in four fat volumes, is the best selection of his non-fiction available, a trove of letters, essays, reviews, and journalism that is breathtaking in its scope and eclectic passions. Orwell had something to say about just about everyone and everything. His letters to such luminaries as Julian Symons, Anthony Powell, Arthur Koestler, and Cyril Connolly are poignant and personal. His essays, covering everything from "English Cooking" to "Literature and Totalitarianism," are memorable, and his books reviews (Hitler's Mein Kampf, Mumford's Herman Melville, Miller's Black Spring, Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, to name just a few) are among the most lucid and intelligent ever written. From 1943 to 1945, he wrote a regular column for the Tribune, a left wing weekly, entitled "As I Please." His observations about life in Britain during the war embraced everything from anti-American sentiment to the history of domestic appliances.

Edition details

• Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher Inc
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1567921337
• ISBN 13: 9781567921335
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 592
• Editor: Orwell Sonia, Angus Ian