Diaries [Paperback]

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 Orwells 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 masterpiecesStarred review. [A] lushly annotated edition of Orwells 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 Orwells impressive chronicles.Read with care, George Orwells diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics. They furnish us with a more intimate picture of a man who, committed to the struggles of the mechanized and modern world, was also drawn by the rhythms of the wild, the rural, and the remote.One cannot help but be struck by the degree to which [Orwell] became, in Henry Jamess words, one of those upon whom nothing was lost. By declining to lie, even as far as possible to himself, and by his determination to seek elusive but verifiable truth, he showed how much can be accomplished by an individual who unites the qualities of intellectual honesty and moral courage.Among the vivifying things about hisNever before published in the United States, this wonderfully annotated collection of George Orwells diaries from 1931 to 1949 is sure to fascinate any fan of his work. From his down and out years to his stint working at the BBC during WWII (something halfway between a girls school and a lunatil3œ