Critical Essays

Critical Essays

Summary

As a critic, George Orwell cast a wide net. Equally at home in discussing Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin, he moved back and forth across the porous borders between essay and journalism, high art and low. A frequent commentator on literature, language, film and drama throughout his career, Orwell turned increasingly to the critical essay in the 1940s, when his most important experiences were behind him and some of his most incisive criticism lay ahead.

These essays follow Orwell as he demonstrates in piece after piece how intent analysis of a work or a body of work gives rise to trenchant aesthetic and philosophical commentary. With masterpieces such as 'Politics and the English Language' and 'Rudyard Kipling' and gems such as 'Good Bad Books', here is an unrivalled education in - as George Packer puts it in his foreword to this new two-volume collection - 'how to be interesting, line after line'.

Reviews

  • Best known for novels 1984 and Animal Farm, Orwell was also a superb essayist, and these two fine collections display his breadth of topic and depth of skill... Unpretentious, intelligent, compassionate and brilliantly insightful
    Doug Johnstone, Big Issue

About the author

George Orwell

Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950), better known by his pen-name, George Orwell, was born in India, where his father worked for the Civil Service. An author and journalist, Orwell was one of the most prominent and influential figures in twentieth-century literature. His unique political allegory Animal Farm was published in 1945, and it was this novel, together with the dystopia of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which brought him world-wide fame. His novels and non-fiction include Burmese Days, Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia.
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