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Orwell destroyed every literary manuscript he ever wrote except one. It survives at Brown University, about half the text of Nineteen Eighty-Four, covered in corrections in his own hand — including the first line, which began life as “It was a cold day in early April, and a million radios were striking thirteen” and became “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen”. He wrote most of it on the Scottish island of Jura between 1946 and 1948, seriously ill with tuberculosis, widowed, raising an adopted son alone, typing the final draft himself because he could not find anyone to come to the island. It was published in June 1949 and he died seven months later, aged forty-six. The rest of the work is nine books of reporting, essays and fiction that keep arriving at the same question: Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia — written after he was shot through the throat in Spain and then hunted by the side he had fought for — and Animal Farm. He had also spent two years at the BBC writing wartime propaganda, and modelled the Ministry of Truth on it. The ten below are chosen on the machinery of power and on who is telling you the truth.
By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Political writing · Nine books · Jura, 1946–48 · Updated September 2026
Quick answer
The closest match is Arthur Koestler, whose novel about a Bolshevik awaiting execution Orwell reviewed and never got over. Behind them both stands the Russian novel that started it, written in 1921. Three writers explain how totalitarianism actually works rather than imagining it, two carry the dystopia forward, and one wrote to Orwell in 1949 to tell him the boot was the wrong prediction.
Where to start if you loved George Orwell
If you want the closest match, read Arthur Koestler.
Darkness at Noon. An old Bolshevik argued into confessing, by logic rather than pain.
If you want the book behind the book, read Yevgeny Zamyatin.
We. A glass city and numbered citizens, written in 1921.
If you want to know how it works, read Hannah Arendt.
The Origins of Totalitarianism. The structure underneath the boot.
If you want the people it happened to, read Svetlana Alexievich.
Secondhand Time. Hundreds of voices, nostalgic and contradictory and real.
If you want the argument against him, read Aldous Huxley.
Brave New World. Control by pleasure, from the man who taught him French.
If you want more books of this kind
My shelf of the best fiction has the rest.
10 authors like George Orwell
Frequently asked questions about authors like George Orwell
Who should I read if I love George Orwell?
Arthur Koestler is the closest — Orwell reviewed Darkness at Noon and its interrogations run straight into Nineteen Eighty-Four. Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, written in 1921, is the book behind both. For how totalitarianism actually operates, Hannah Arendt on the structure and Czesław Miłosz on why intelligent people collaborate, with Svetlana Alexievich for the testimony of those who lived through it. Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro carry the dystopia forward, Ray Bradbury got the consumer version right, and Christopher Hitchens is the best guide to Orwell himself. Aldous Huxley is the argument against.
Which Orwell should I start with?
Animal Farm (1945) if you want the short one: about a hundred pages, a farm, and the clearest account of a revolution eating itself ever written. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) if you want the famous one, and be warned that the last third is genuinely distressing. But the non-fiction is where many readers end up living: Homage to Catalonia (1938) on Spain and Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) on poverty are better prose than either novel, and the essays — “Politics and the English Language”, “Shooting an Elephant” — are the best of all.
What did Huxley actually write to Orwell?
In October 1949, four months after publication, Huxley wrote to Orwell — whom he had taught French at Eton — praising the book and then dissenting from it. His argument was that a ruling oligarchy would eventually find less arduous ways of governing than the boot and the interrogation cell, because control through conditioning and gratification is cheaper and provokes no resistance. It is the most famous disagreement in modern dystopian fiction, and it is worth forming your own view on who was closer.
Why does Orwell get quoted by everyone?
Because he attacked his own side as hard as the other one, which leaves plenty for anyone to quote. He was a democratic socialist who wrote the century's two most effective anti-communist books; he despised imperialism while having served the empire as a policeman in Burma; he wrote against euphemism in a language now full of the word Orwellian. Christopher Hitchens's Why Orwell Matters is the best treatment of the problem, and its conclusion is that the refusal to belong is the point.
What was the list he gave to the government?
In 1949, seriously ill, Orwell gave a Foreign Office unit called the Information Research Department a list of some thirty-five writers and public figures he considered unsuitable as anti-communist propagandists, with private notes on several of them. It became public in 1996 and 2003 and has been argued about ever since — whether it was a blacklist, a private opinion solicited by a friend, or an old man's error. The list existed, the names were real, and no one was prosecuted as a result. It belongs in any honest account of him.
Is Nineteen Eighty-Four accurate about the present?
Partly, and less than the quoting suggests. The permanent surveillance, the rewriting of records and the attack on the idea of verifiable fact have all arrived in forms he would recognise. The mechanism has not: the modern versions run largely on commercial data collection and voluntary participation rather than on a Ministry with a boot, which is precisely Huxley's objection. Reading both, plus Arendt on why regimes attack facts rather than simply lying, is more useful than either alone.
What happened to his manuscripts?
He destroyed them. The only literary manuscript of Orwell's that survives is roughly half of Nineteen Eighty-Four, held at Brown University since 1992, heavily corrected in his hand — it shows the famous opening line in its earlier form, and the first appearances of Newspeak and of Big Brother. Everything else he burned or threw away, which is its own small comment from a man who wrote a novel about the deliberate destruction of the record.
What order should I read him in?
Start with the essays, which are free almost everywhere and take twenty minutes each. Then Animal Farm, then Homage to Catalonia, then Nineteen Eighty-Four, then The Road to Wigan Pier — whose second half is an argument with English socialists that still causes fights. The early novels, Burmese Days and Keep the Aspidistra Flying, are for when you already care.
Footnotes
- 70th anniversary of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, with the manuscript revisions — Brown University Library
- Nineteen Eighty-Four at 77, with composition details — June 2026
- Adaptations of Nineteen Eighty-Four — Wikipedia
- George Orwell — Wikipedia
- The Orwell Society — anniversary reflections and archive notes
List last reviewed 23 September 2026.
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“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
— George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949.
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