Volume 50, Number 17 · November 6, 2003
Good Man, Bad World
By John Banville
Orwell: The Life
by D.J. Taylor
John Macrae/Henry Holt, 466 pp., $30.00
Inside George Orwell
by Gordon Bowker
Palgrave Macmillan, 495 pp., $35.00
Although George Orwell requested in his will that no biography of him should be written, his must be the most picked-over illustrious literary corpse of the twentieth century. He was hardly cold in his grave—he died in 1950—when the first critical studies began to appear, many by people who had known him, and all of them weighted with biographical reminiscence or speculation. Then in 1972 Peter Stansky and William Abrahams published a two-volume biography, The Unknown Orwell, which was well received, but which prompted Orwell's widow, Sonia, to go against her husband's wishes and commission Bernard Crick to write the official version, which was published in 1980. Why she should have chosen Crick, a well-respected political scientist but no arbiter of literary values, is something of a puzzle—but then, the redoubtable Mrs. Orwell was famously quixotic.[1] Besides, her first choice, Richard Ellmann, had declined the commission.
Review, 4803 words
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