An Age Like This, 1920-1940 - (Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell) by George Orwell (Paperback)

Book 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.

Review Quotes

"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

"These four volumes might be the perfect tonic for what ails our society."--America Magazine

"The nearest thing to Orwell's testament is sprawling rather than compact, the four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters. Coedited by Ian Angus and Sonia Orwell, George Orwell's widow, it includes nearly all his nonfiction from 1920 to 1950....The set was first published fifty years ago and was reissued last year in a commendable act of literary citizenship by David R. Godine, Inc., a small, semi-legendary Boston publisher. The four volumes are a very rich harvest. All the great essays are here: 'Why I Write, ' 'My Country Right or Left, ' 'Looking Back on the Spanish War, ' 'Notes on Nationalism, ' 'The Prevention of Literature, ' 'Politics and the English Language, ' 'Writers and Leviathan, ' the essays on Dickens, Tolstoy, Kipling, Henry Miller, P. G. Wodehouse, and more."--Commonweal Magazine

"While Orwell is best known for Animal Farm and 1984, most of his writing derived from his tireless work as a journalist, and thanks to this welcome reissue of The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, which has been out of print for a decade, readers can find it all in one place. All of the author's insightful, hard-hitting essays and journalistic pieces are here...the most complete picture of the writer and man possible."--Kirkus Reviews