Volume 39, Number 3 · January 30, 1992
The Tory Anarchist
By Stuart Hampshire
Orwell: The Authorized Biography
by Michael Shelden
Harper Collins, 497 pp., $25.00
There have been a number of personal memoirs and at least two biographies of Orwell, and both the course of his life and his peculiar and impressive personality, as seen by his friends, are fairly well known. Certainly his life makes a dramatic story: particularly his service with POUM and the Republican forces in Spain, the nearly mortal wound that he received there, and his escape through France to England from the Communist commissars. There are also his tentative beginnings as a novelist—Burmese Days (1934), Keep the Aspidistras Flying (1936), and Coming Up for Air (1939)—leading to the enormous popular and critical success of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, at the end of his short life.
Review, 3925 words
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