Books Written by George Orwell

George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, usually shortened to 1984. It was published by Secker & Warburg in London on 8 June 1949, and was the last book he completed before his death seven months later. George Orwell was the pen name of the English writer Eric Arthur Blair.

George Orwell, the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, wrote Animal Farm. He wrote it between November 1943 and February 1944, and Secker & Warburg published it in London on 17 August 1945, after several other publishers had turned it down. It was the book that made him famous.

George Orwell (1903–1950) was an English novelist, essayist and journalist, born Eric Arthur Blair, best known for Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Born in India and educated at Eton, he served in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922 to 1927, then wrote about poverty, the Spanish Civil War, politics and language. His attacks on totalitarianism and propaganda made his name an adjective: “Orwellian”.

His real name was Eric Arthur Blair, and he kept it in private life. In late 1932, before Down and Out in Paris and London appeared, he chose “George Orwell” from a shortlist that included P. S. Burton and Kenneth Miles: George for England’s patron saint, Orwell for the River Orwell in Suffolk, one of his favourite places. He called it “a good round English name”. More writers who did the same are on my list of authors who wrote under pseudonyms.

He was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, then in the Bengal Presidency of British India and now in the state of Bihar. His father was a British civil servant in India, and in 1904 his mother took the children to England, to Henley-on-Thames, so Orwell was British and grew up in England.

Mostly in England, with spells abroad. After Eton and Burma he lived in Paris in 1928–29, made his parents’ home in Southwold, Suffolk, his base from 1929, and from April 1936 rented the Stores, a cottage in Wallington, Hertfordshire. He lived in London through much of the 1940s, latterly at 27b Canonbury Square, Islington, and from May 1946 at Barnhill, a farmhouse on the Scottish island of Jura.

A socialist, not a communist. In “Why I Write” (1946) he said that his serious work since 1936 had been written “against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it”. Fighting in the POUM militia in Spain in 1937, he saw Soviet-backed communists turn on their allies on the left, and Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are both attacks on Stalinism.

He died of tuberculosis on 21 January 1950, aged 46, at University College Hospital in London, when an artery in his lungs ruptured. He had married Sonia Brownell in his hospital room three months earlier. He was buried in the churchyard of All Saints’ Church, Sutton Courtenay, in Oxfordshire.

Mostly in 1947 and 1948, at Barnhill on Jura, where he had moved in May 1946. He finished the first draft in November 1947 and the second in November 1948, working while seriously ill, and sent the manuscript to Secker & Warburg on 4 December 1948. The novel, first called The Last Man in Europe, was published on 8 June 1949.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian novel about a totalitarian state that controls what people do, say and even think. Winston Smith rewrites old newspaper records at the Ministry of Truth in London, the chief city of Airstrip One, a province of the superstate Oceania, where Big Brother watches through telescreens and the Thought Police purge anyone who does not conform. His affair with Julia and his secret rebellion end in Room 101. It was filmed in 1956 and in 1984, with John Hurt as Winston.

Animal Farm is a short satirical fable about a revolution betrayed. The animals of Manor Farm drive out the farmer, Mr Jones, but the pigs who lead them, above all Napoleon, become tyrants in turn, until the commandment that all animals are equal reads “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”. Orwell meant it as an allegory of the Russian Revolution and Stalin’s Soviet Union; it became an animated film in 1954.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is his most famous and most influential: Time put it on its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005, and readers of the New York Times Book Review ranked it third among the best books of the previous 125 years in 2021. Animal Farm is the most read, and many critics rate Homage to Catalonia and the essays as highly as either.

He published nine full-length books: six novels and three books of reportage. On top of those came the long essay The Lion and the Unicorn (1941), the essay collections Inside the Whale (1940) and Critical Essays (1946), and hundreds of essays, reviews and columns gathered after his death. This page covers 13 key books.

Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), Burmese Days (1934), A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Homage to Catalonia (1938), Coming Up for Air (1939), Inside the Whale (1940), The Lion and the Unicorn (1941), Animal Farm (1945), Critical Essays (1946), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (1950).

Start with Animal Farm. It is a short fable that can be read in an afternoon and sets out the theme of a revolution betrayed by those who lead it; Nineteen Eighty-Four is longer and much darker, and reads more fully once you know where his fear of totalitarianism came from. His books are all standalone, so after those two go to Homage to Catalonia, then Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays, then Down and Out in Paris and London and Coming Up for Air.

It is Orwell’s own account of why he became a writer, first published in the magazine Gangrel in summer 1946. He names four motives every writer has in some measure — sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purpose — and explains how the Spanish war made him a political writer. He says Animal Farm was the first book in which he tried, “with full consciousness of what I was doing”, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.

It describes the execution of a prisoner in Burma, seen by a young officer of the imperial police. It first appeared in The Adelphi in August 1931, under his real name. On the way to the gallows the condemned man steps aside to avoid a puddle, and the narrator suddenly sees “the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide”. Orwell later said he had witnessed a hanging in Burma, but no record shows where or when, and he once called the piece “only a story”.

In March 1949 Orwell gave Celia Kirwan, who worked for the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department, a list of writers and other public figures he considered unsuitable to write for it because of pro-communist sympathies. It was not published until 2003, and it remains debated: some see a betrayal of his own values, others an anti-Stalinist judgement he was entitled to make.