My Country Right or Left (1940-1943)

”It is an astonishing tribute to Orwell's gifts as a natural, unaffected writer that, although the historical events he is unfolding are all too bitterly familiar, the reader turns the page as though he did not know what was going to happen. Here, then, is a social, literary, and political history... which, while being intensely personal never forgets its allegiance to objective truth." —The Economist

George Orwell is without question one of the most important writers of the 20th century. The adjective Orwellian and terms such as doublethink, Big Brother, thought police, memory hole, Newspeak, or unperson, are all due to him, as resonant today as in his time. The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, in four volumes, is the best selection of his nonfiction available. Written between 1920 and 1950, here is a trove of letters, essays, reviews, and journalism that is breathtaking in its scope, the force of intellect, 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 memorably insightful, 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. This is a collection that will expand anyone's understanding of the writer and of the world he so profoundly understood.