Fifty Essays

The bibliography of George Orwell includes journalism essays novels and non-fiction books written by the British writer Eric Blair (1903–1950) either under his own name or more usually under his pen name George Orwell. Orwell was a prolific writer on topics related to contemporary English society and literary criticism who have been declared perhaps the 20th centurys best chronicler of English culture. His non-fiction cultural and political criticism constitutes the majority of his work but Orwell also wrote in several genres of fictional literature. Orwell is best remembered for his political commentary as a left-wing anti-totalitarian. As he explained in the essay Why I Write (1946) Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism as I understand it. To that end Orwell used his fiction as well as his journalism to defend his political convictions. He first achieved widespread acclaim with his fictional novella Animal Farm and cemented his place in history with the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four shortly before his death. While fiction accounts for a small fraction of his total output these two novels are his best-selling works having sold almost fifty million copies in sixty-two languages by 2007—more than any other pair of books by a twentieth-century author.