George Orwell’s Best Essays
Not everything is 1984 and Animal Farm
George Orwell wrote hundreds of essays, reviews, articles, and letters throughout his life.
He covers topics that range from the Spanish Civil War and totalitarianism to the atomic bomb and Gandhi that proves to us that Orwell’s legacy goes beyond his most acclaimed novels — 1984 and Animal Farm —, giving us an opportunity to dig into his work and read what he wrote to understand what he believed in during his time.
Here there are seven essays that everyone should read.
1. Why I Write
“What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art.”
Here, Orwell takes us on a journey through his literary career — since he was five years old. How his view of the world gradually changes when he worked for the Indian Imperial Police in Burma (India) where he sees the inequality and poverty present in the British colony at the time, his experience in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), and the Second World War with Hitler ruling a totalitarian society.
“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.”
2. Literature and Totalitarianism
As part of the Greatest Generation, the ones born from 1901 to 1927, George Orwell witnessed the atrocities happening in Europe during World War II — including how these affected literature.
His main idea is that literature does not exist in a totalitarian society because it abolishes freedom of thought. This kind of government controls your emotional life and thoughts by creating a rigid code of conduct for you to follow based on an ideology imposed by the one in power.
You can neither criticize nor have an opinion about any topic.
Essentially, this essay provides you a clear image of to what extent the totalitarian societies during that period were retaining their citizens, isolating them from the outside world to have nothing to compare to their miserable living conditions.
“The peculiarity of the totalitarian state is that though it controls thought, it does not fix it.”
3. Notes on Nationalism
In this essay, Orwell gets you in the mind of a nationalist person, which are its main characteristics and in what peculiar way this one thinks.
He argues that nationalism is this desire for competitive power not for oneself but for the nation, ideology, religion, or any organization chose to blur its individuality in.
4. Can Socialists Be Happy?
Starting with how compellingly Charles Dickens portrays happiness in his novel, this essay debunks our perception of what happiness actually is with literary examples and controversial topics that only a few would dare to write about.
Utopias (incidentally the coined word Utopia doesn’t mean ‘a good place’, it means merely a ‘non-existent place’) have been common in literature of the past three or four hundred years but the ‘favourable’ ones are invariably unappetising, and usually lacking in vitality as well.
5. Notes on the Way
In the first part, Orwell explains what racism really is: “an invention created by the conquered nations to explode other groups but at the same time making it seem justifiable as they pretend to see them as something below humans.”
In other words, they create ‘castes’.
To understand the historical context, during those decades the eugenics movement was used to make distinctions between the dominant class (genetically superior) and the conquered people (genetically inferior).
In the second part, the focus here is on how to create a society away from constant chaos and Orwell points out that the only way is a “Heaven on Earth” — a society in which humans feel united for an abstract concept such as “honor”, “humanity”, “nation”, or a “god”.
Thought-provoking, riveting, and absorbing would be the words I would use to describe Orwell’s essays that invite us to stay alert and think for ourselves.
Thanks for reading!
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