Saturday, August 11, 2012

"[A] lushly annotated edition of Orwell’s diaries from 1931 to 1949…. Born Eric Arthur Blair, Orwell, as these diaries reveal, lived a varied and even dichotomized life. …Editor Davison (English/De Montfort Univ.) supplies necessary contextual information and footnotes generously, but stays in the shadows and allows us to truly enjoy Orwell’s impressive chronicles.” --Kirkus Reviews

 

A major literary event—the long-awaited publication of George Orwell's diaries, chronicling the events that inspired his greatest works.

This groundbreaking volume, never before published in the United States, at last introduces the interior life of George Orwell, the writer who defined twentieth-century political thought. Written as individual books throughout his career, the eleven surviving diaries collected here record Orwell’s youthful travels among miners and itinerant laborers, the fearsome rise of totalitarianism, the horrific drama of World War II, and the feverish composition of his great masterpieces Animal Farm and 1984 (which have now sold more copies than any two books by any other twentieth-century author). Personal entries cover the tragic death of his first wife and Orwell’s own decline as he battled tuberculosis. Exhibiting great brilliance of prose and composition, these treasured dispatches, edited by the world’s leading Orwell scholar, exhibit “the seeds of famous passages to come” (New Statesman) and amount to a volume as penetrating as the autobiography he would never write.

Read Christopher Hitchens' article about Orwell's diaries HERE.

Read a bit of the diaries via Granta HERE.


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