The Book of Orwell 1 · Written by himself, from his essays, Homage to Catalonia, and his letters
George Orwell, whose name was Eric Arthur Blair, born in Bengal in British India in June 1903, died in London in 1950 at forty-six. He went to St Cyprian’s and then to Eton, did not go on to a university, and served five years as an imperial policeman in Burma. Afterwards he worked as an assistant in a Hampstead bookshop. He wrote nine books and several hundred essays and reviews; Animal Farm came out in 1945 and Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949, and he was dead the year after. This volume rests on what he wrote himself — the essays, Homage to Catalonia, and his letters — and not on any other man’s record of him. He stopped believing at fourteen and never began again: not in divine creation, not in an omnipotent god, not in any life after this one. He wrote that man is the measure of all things, and that our job is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have. He called the Roman church an enemy of freedom of thought and speech and of the equality of men. He kept nonetheless a certain fondness for the forms of Christianity, and left word that he was to be buried by the rites of the church of his country, and he was. The Order does not read that as doubt. He wanted the form and not the faith, as a man may love the cathedrals of Europe and want nothing to do with what was preached in them. What can be checked: in a trench in Spain a bullet went through his throat; the side he had volunteered for later put him on the list to be seized, and he fled that city by night; as a young man he went and lived by choice in the poorest places he could find; he died of tuberculosis at forty-six, six months after finishing his last book.
1.1People ask me why I write. Let me set out my own reasons honestly, beginning with the least attractive.
1.2The first: sheer egoism. Wanting to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death.
1.3I put it first not in order to appear honest. I put it first because it is in fact first.
1.4Some say writers are not like that. Whoever says so is mostly covering for himself.
1.5People who write are vain, selfish and lazy. And under those three lies something I cannot account for, and I will not pretend I can.
1.6The second: a liking for words themselves. For a sentence set straight, for the beat of a paragraph read aloud.
1.7That one looks harmless and needs watching. A man who writes for the sound of the sentence will in the end bend what he says to suit the sentence.
1.8The third: wanting things put down and kept. What people did, and how it looked at the time, somebody has to write down.
1.9The fourth: wanting to push the world a little toward what I think is right.
1.10In my life the fourth has weighed most. But it did not weigh most by nature.
1.11Had I been born in another time I should probably have written books describing scenery, and never known whether I had a position at all.
1.12It was the age I was born into that forced me into being a writer of pamphlets.
1.13I say this to make a general point: what a man writes is mostly not chosen by him. It is settled by which stretch of years he was born into.
1.14So when you read what a man has written, look at what he went through when he was young. Without that you will read him wrongly.
1.15One last thing about myself: the worst books I wrote are the ones I wrote with no position and forced out anyway.
1.16The tolerable ones are those where there was something I had to say and I managed to say it clearly.