An Age Like This: The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell 1920-1940

by George Orwell, Sonia Orwell (Editor), Ian Angus (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781567921335
Publisher:	David R. Godine, Publisher
Publication date:	01/07/2004
Series:	Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Series , #1
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	600
Sales rank:	578,445
Product dimensions:	5.78(w) x 8.28(h) x 1.58(d)

About the Author

George Orwell is widely considered one of the greatest writers of the past century. Although his novels 1984 and Animal Farm are now the most widely-read of his works, Orwell was primarily a nonfiction writer. The occasionally radical political content in his essays, memoirs, and journalistic works brought him some censure during his life, but they now make up one of the most celebrated bodies of work in the English language.

Sonia Brownell Orwell, as a young woman, was responsible for transcribing and editing the copy text for the first edition of the Winchester Malory as assistant to the eminent medievalist at Manchester University, Eugene Vinaver. Brownell first met Orwell when she worked as the assistant to Cyril Connolly, a friend of his from Eton College, at the literary magazine Horizon. The two were married in October 1949, only three months before Orwell’s death from tuberculosis.

Ian Angus, a widely recognized Orwell scholar for decades, helped establish the Orwell Archive at UniversityCollege, London and, in 1968, worked with Sonia Orwell in editing Orwell's Collected Journalism, Essays and Letters published by Secker & Warburg in England.

Table of Contents

Praise for the four-volume The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell

“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.”—Eric Liebetrau, Kirkus Reviews

“These four volumes might be the perfect tonic for what ails our society.”—Franklin Freeman, America Magazine

Editorial Reviews

“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

From the Publisher

This four-volume set, first published in 1968, covers 30 years of Orwell's nonfiction. Each volume is divided by year and intermixes his correspondence with news stories and discussions on numerous subjects. Orwell's nonfiction is well worth reading; these reasonably priced books offer an extensive collection for both academic and public libraries. (LJ 2/1/01) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

This is the first of four volumes reprinted in paperbound editions from the 1968 Harcourt, Brace, and World publications. Sonia Orwell provides a brief introduction in which she describes how the author of was a writer who "...wrote nine books and published two short collections of essays before he died: but in terms of actual words...produced very much more than seems possible for someone who died at the age of forty-six...." Presented chronologically, Orwell's letters give a picture of his life as well as his work. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews