| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9780451524935 | | Publisher: Signet Book | | Publish Date: 5/1/1990 | | Buy.com Sku: 30072656 | | Item#: RNLLSD | | Buy.com Sales Rank: 65167 | | Dimensions (in Inches) 7.25H x 4L x 0.75T |
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| | | Satire on the possible horrors of a totalitarian regime in England in 1984.
Annotation:
George Orwell's celebrated 1948 vision of a world subsumed in tyranny and war describes the process of events by which Winston Smith, a London clerk at the Ministry of Truth, comes to understand the true nature and aims of the government he works for, and portrays his doomed attempt to create a private life for himself and his lover, Julia. One of the bleakest political novels ever written, 1984 illustrates Orwell's despair that democracy could ever summon the strength to overcome totalitarianism in his lifetime.
| PraiseNew Statesman
"A book that goes through the reader like an east wind, cracking the skin, opening the sores; hope has died in Mr. Orwell's wintry mind, and only pain is known. I do not think I have ever read a novel more frightening and depressing; and yet, such are the originality, the suspense, the speed of writing and withering indignation that it is impossible to put the book down. The faults of Orwell as a writer--monotony, nagging, the lonely schoolboy shambling down the one dispiriting track--are transformed now he rises to a large subject." - V. S. Pritchett 06/18/1949New York Times Book Review
"[I]t is probable that no other work of this generation has made us desire freedom more earnestly or loathe tyranny with such fulness....It is in the intimate history, of course, that he reveals his stature as a novelist, for it is here that the moral and the psychological values with which he is concerned are brought out of the realm of political prophecy into that of personalized drama....'Nineteen Eighty-Four', the most contemporary novel of this year and who knows of how many past and to come, is a great examination into and dramatization of Lord Acton's famous apothegm, 'Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.'" - Mark Schorer 06/12/1949 New Yorker
"'Nineteen Eighty-Four' confirms its author in the special, honorable place he holds in our intellectual life....[I]t is a profound, terrifying, and wholly fascinating book....Orwell's theory of power is developed brilliantly, at considerable length. And the social system that it postulates is described with magnificent circumstantiality." - Lionel Trilling 06/18/1949 |
| Author Bio| George Orwell | | Son of an English administrator stationed in India (in the "Opium Department"), Orwell (born Eric Blair) returned to Henley-on-Thames in England with his mother when he was 2. He eventually attended Eton, becoming a somewhat rebellious boy who questioned his family's middle-class values. From 1921 to 1927, he served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, a job he loathed, and after he resigned he devoted himself to learning to write, first in England, then in Paris, where he began to publish articles on social issues under the pen name of George Orwell. All his life, Orwell was aware of and outraged by poverty and unemployment and the inequities of the oppressive English class system. Impoverished himself, he worked in the kitchen of a Paris hotel, out of which came his memoir, DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON. He wrote several novels during this period--the first to be published was A CLERGYMAN'S DAUGHTER in 1935--as well as his classic study of Yorkshire coal miners, THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER (1937). (Later in life, Orwell commented, "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism...") Orwell fought with the antifascists in the Spanish Civil War, detailing his experiences in HOMAGE TO CATALONIA (1938), and during World War II he wrote for the BBC. He is credited with coining the expression "cold war." Orwell's scathing political satire, ANIMAL FARM, was published after the war, in 1945. His first wife also died that year, and he and his son moved to the island of Jura off the Scottish coast, where Orwell wrote his most famous and influential novel, 1984, which was published in 1949. He remarried shortly after, but in 1950 he died of the tuberculosis that had long plagued him. |
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