World Review. 1950.
A year and a half after Orwell’s death, the London magazine, World Review, devoted most of its June 1950 issue to articles that summarized and evaluated the unique place he had occupied on the English literary scene. As Bertrand Russell wrote in a brief appreciation, Orwell’s was a tragic life, “partly owing to illness, but still more owing to a love of humanity and an incapacity for comfortable illusion.”
Orwell was a British journalist and author, who wrote two of the most famous novels of the 20th century 'Animal Farm' and 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'.
Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on 25 June 1903 in eastern India, the son of a British colonial civil servant. He was educated in England and, after he left Eton, joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, then a British colony. He resigned in 1927 and decided to become a writer. In 1928, he moved to Paris where lack of success as a writer forced him into a series of menial jobs. He described his experiences in his first book, 'Down and Out in Paris and London', published in 1933. He took the name George Orwell, shortly before its publication. This was followed by his first novel, 'Burmese Days', in 1934.
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Orwell kept a domestic diary in which he recorded information about the weather and his farm animals, including his goat Muriel, who inspired the homonymous character in Animal Farm. (UCL: © Orwell Archive, UCL Library Special Collections.)
It is now almost a third of a century since George Orwell's publication of Animal Farm made him famous in the United States. Outside of certain radical and literary circles Orwell was virtually unknown in America before 1946. He had written an occasional piece for journals like the New Republic, Dwight Macdonald's idiosyncratic Politics, plus a series of "London Letters" for Philip Rahv's radical magazine, Partisan Review. In the early 1930's Harper's had published some of his earlier works, novels like A Clergyman's Daughter and Burmese Days, and non-fiction pieces like Down and Out in Paris and London. They were largely ignored, unread, and unreviewed. Orwell's initial failure to reach an American audience had many causes. First and foremost, he did not fit into any recognizable political category, right, left or center. Those American intellectuals who knew his work were uneasy with him. He was a self-proclaimed socialist who seemed to take a special pleasure in assaulting his fellow leftists, a foe of nationalism who wrote movingly and beautifully about English patriotism, the English countryside and English customs like tea drinking and pubs. Secondly, in the 1930's he had attacked communism as a form of totalitarianism just as evil as fascism or nazism. Most American leftists, still caught up in the naive belief of "no enemies on the left," felt uncomfortable before this indictment. Finally, most of Orwell's writing before 1946 was of the kind that would have limited appeal in the United States. His fiction and political writings dealt with topics that were of peculiar interest to the English and his essays on such disparate topics as humorous postcards, the public schools or English murder mysteries also fit within a framework that most Americans could not follow. Animal Farm changed all that.
To read the full article in JSTOR, click HERE.
Selection of issues of the Orwell Society Newsletter (now Journal), published bi-annually since 2012.
