![]() ![]() ![]() The early academic critics-up to the late 1960’s-were often Orwell’s personal friends or acquaintances, who tended to see his early novels as conventionally realistic and strongly autobiographical. This reaction to Orwell’s novels was generally promoted posthumously, since his fiction in the 1930’s was often ignored by the larger reading public and panned by those reviewers who did pick up one of his books. Indeed, Jeffrey Meyers is convinced that Orwell, the writer of essays, political tracts, and fiction, “is more widely read than perhaps any other serious writer of the twentieth century” ( A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell, 1975).Įxcepting Animal Farm, most critics view George Orwell’s fictions as aesthetically flawed creations, the work of a political thinker whose artistry was subordinate to his intensely didactic, partisan passions. Both have been translated into so many other languages and have been so widely read that the adjective “Orwellian” has international currency, synonymous with the “ghastly political future,” as Bernard Crick has pointed out ( George Orwell: A Life, 1980). Although George Orwell (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) is widely recognized as one of the best essayists of the twentieth century, his reputation as a novelist rests almost entirely on two works: the political allegory Animal Farm and the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four. ![]()
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