George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is unquestionably the most famous dystopian novel of all times. Written in the year of 1948, the author swapped the last two digits while describing a future totalitarian society where the minds, attitudes and actions of the subjects are thoroughly scrutinized by the "Thought Police", suspected dissidents tracked down and where the worship of the mythical party leader Big Brother is forced upon the masses. The low-ranking party member Winston Smith begins secretly to question the whole system and initiates a forbidden love affair with another party member.
George Orwell set out 'to make political writing into an art', and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell's essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell's Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, an... continue