Everyone knows George Orwell as the author of the dystopian novel 1984, and to a lesser extent the satirical Animal Farm. People love to read these books so they can begin to toss around terms like “Orwellian”, “Big Brother”, “Ministry of Truth”, etc. However, these books can be appreciated in a whole new light if one is familiar with Orwell’s three previous non-fiction works. Orwell had firsthand experience with being wanted by the police, watching propaganda campaigns at work, and being a nonperson working 17 hours a day. He was kind enough to write about it too, so we can get it from the horse’s mouth, as it were, instead of reading novels. A marvelous thing about his early work is the sense of perspective it brings, as it tells the unvarnished truth about the life of the poor in the relatively near past.
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George Orwell Wrote Non-Fiction, Too
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Everyone knows George Orwell as the author of the dystopian novel 1984, and to a lesser extent the satirical Animal Farm. People love to read these books so they can begin to toss around terms like “Orwellian”, “Big Brother”, “Ministry of Truth”, etc. However, these books can be appreciated in a whole new light if one is familiar with Orwell’s three previous non-fiction works. Orwell had firsthand experience with being wanted by the police, watching propaganda campaigns at work, and being a nonperson working 17 hours a day. He was kind enough to write about it too, so we can get it from the horse’s mouth, as it were, instead of reading novels. A marvelous thing about his early work is the sense of perspective it brings, as it tells the unvarnished truth about the life of the poor in the relatively near past.