Books and Novels
Orwell composed six novels: Burmese Days, A Clergyman's Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Most of these were semi-autobiographical. Burmese Days was inspired by his period working as an imperial policeman and is fictionalized; "A Clergyman's Daughter" follows a young woman who passes out from overwork and wakes up an amnesiac, forced to wander the countryside as she finds herself, eventually losing her belief in God, despite being the daughter of a clergyman
In addition to his fiction, Orwell also wrote a number of book-length non-fiction essays: Down and Out in Paris and London records his experiences tramping and teaching in those two cities; The Road to Wigan Pier is initially a study of poverty in the north of England, but ends with an extended biographical essay of Orwell's experiences with poverty; and Homage to Catalonia recounts his experiences volunteering to fight fascism in anarchist Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War with the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification.
- Down and Out in Paris and London (9 January 1933, Victor Gollancz Ltd)
- Burmese Days (October 1934, Harper & Brothers)
- A Clergyman's Daughter (11 March 1935, Victor Gollancz Ltd)
- Keep the Aspidistra Flying (20 April 1936, Victor Gollancz Ltd)
- The Road to Wigan Pier (February 1937, Left Book Club edition; 8 March 1937 Victor Gollancz Ltd edition for the general public)
- Homage to Catalonia (25 April 1938, Secker and Warburg)
- Coming Up for Air (12 June 1939, Victor Gollancz Ltd)
- Animal Farm (17 August 1945, Secker and Warburg)
- Nineteen Eighty-Four (8 June 1949, Secker and Warburg)
Read more about this topic: Books By George Orwell
Famous quotes containing the words books and/or novels:
“...I believed passionately that Communists were a race of horned men who divided their time equally between the burning of Nancy Drew books and the devising of a plan of nuclear attack that would land the largest and most lethal bomb squarely upon the third-grade class of Thomas Jefferson School in Morristown, New Jersey.”
—Fran Lebowitz (b. 1950)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)