Books By George Orwell - Collected Editions

Collected Editions

Two essay collections were published during Orwell's lifetime—Inside the Whale and Other Essays in 1940 and Critical Essays in 1946 (the latter published in the United States as Dickens, Dali, and Others in 1958.) His publisher followed up these anthologies with Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays in 1950, England Your England and Other Essays in 1953—which was revised as Such, Such Were the Joys—and Collected Essays in 1961. The first significant publications in the United States were Doubleday's A Collection of Essays by George Orwell from 1954, 1956's The Orwell Reader, Fiction, Essays, and Reportage from Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, and Penguin's Selected Essays in 1957; re-released in 1962 with the title Inside the Whale and Other Essays and in abridged form as Why I Write in 2005 as a part of the Great Ideas series. In the aforementioned series, Penguin also published the short collections Books v. Cigarettes (2008), Some Thoughts on the Common Toad (2010), and Decline of the English Murder (2009). The later does not contain the same texts as Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays, published by Penguin in association with Secker & Warburg in 1965.

In 1976 Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd in association with Octopus Books published The Complete Novels, this edition was latter republished by Penguin Books in 1983, and reprinted in Penguin Classics 2000. Since the publication of Davison's corrected critical edition, John Carey's thorough Essays was released on 15 October 2002, as a part of the Everyman's Library and George Packer edited two collections for Houghton Mifflin, released on 13 October 2008—All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays and Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays.

Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus edited a four volume collection of Orwell's writings, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, divided into four volumes:

• An Age Like This 1920–1940
• My Country Right or Left 1940–1943 (first published 1968)
• As I Please, 1943–1945
• In Front of Your Nose, 1945–1950

The Complete Works of George Orwell is a twenty-volume series, with the first nine being devoted to the books and novels and the final eleven volumes entitled:

• A Kind of Compulsion: 1903–1936
• Facing Unpleasant Facts: 1937–1939
• A Patriot After All: 1940–1941
• All Propaganda Is Lies: 1941–1942
• Keeping Our Little Corner Clean: 1942–1943
• Two Wasted Years: 1943
• I Have Tried to Tell the Truth: 1943–1944
• I Belong to the Left: 1945
• Smothered Under Journalism: 1946
• It Is What I Think: 1947–1948
• Our Job Is to Make Life Worth Living: 1949–1950

Davison later compiled a handful of writings—including letters, an obituary for H. G. Wells, and his reconstruction of Orwell's list—into Lost Orwell: Being a Supplement to The Complete Works of George Orwell, which was published by Timewell Press in 2006, with a paperback published on 25 September 2007. In The Daily Telegraph, Tom Rosenthal called it "...a treasure trove of new discoveries." Lost Orwell also received favourable reviews in The Sunday Times and Private Eye. In The Spectator Philip Hesner wrote a mostly favourable review, but added "I was quite pleased to have read this book, and Orwell's alluring personality has a knack of shining out of even the most banal sentence I wouldn't necessarily recommend buying it, though." In 2011, Davison's selection of the letters and journal entries were published as George Orwell: A Life in Letters and Diaries by Harvill Secker.