Both books represent his transitional period and in many ways foreshadow the coming of his masterpieces, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948), which together have sold more than 20 million copies in 30 languages worldwide.
Books that followed his Moroccan stay include his brilliant portrait of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia (1938), and Coming Up For Air (1939), a novel written while Orwell was in Morocco. His best earlier books- Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), Burmese Days (1934) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)-reflect the sensibilities of a compassionate, yet objective, observer of the working-class poor. Orwell's Morocco interval is most significant because it marks his transformation from a conventional novelist distinguished by empathy with the oppressed to a powerful and astute political writer. What he accomplished there helps round out our picture of the century's compassionate social critic. Of course, every good writer is more than the sum of the ideas in his greatest book, and George Orwell is more than the gloomy pessimist who wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four.įor another picture of Orwell, we can look at him just 10 years before that book appeared, when he was basking in the pleasure of the Moroccan winter, spending six months in Marrakech, resting, observing, thinking and writing. Reading him can help us move toward a clearer understanding of the post-war and post-Cold War world. So do his warnings about creeping totalitarianism, though on a different scale today than when Nineteen Eighty-Four was published nearly 50 years ago. Orwell's fear for the language remains relevant amid the din and ambiguity of political rhetoric and advertising lingo. His reputation as a social forecaster became that of a warning intellect, but his admonitions are valid today. Then communism collapsed-on a global scale-and the dangers Orwell described seemed to disappear. Might Big Brother become fact in the century's closing decades? And might Newspeak and Doublethink indeed vitiate human language and memory in an information-crazed world? His apocalyptic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and his savage satire Animal Farm left the impression that he might prove to be the 20th century's chief social forecaster. At the height of the Cold War, George Orwell, "one of England's great and necessary writers," again became a major topic of conversation.
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