This groundbreaking volume, never before published in the United States, at last introduces the interior life of George Orwell, the writer who defined twentieth-century political thought. Written as individual books throughout his career, the eleven surviving diaries collected here record Orwell’s youthful travels among miners and itinerant laborers, the fearsome rise of totalitarianism, the horrific drama of World War II, and the feverish composition of his great masterpieces Animal Farm and 1984 (which have now sold more copies than any two books by any other twentieth-century author). Personal entries cover the tragic death of his first wife and Orwell’s own decline as he battled tuberculosis. Exhibiting great brilliance of prose and composition, these treasured dispatches, edited by the world’s leading Orwell scholar, exhibit “the seeds of famous passages to come” (New Statesman) and amount to a volume as penetrating as the autobiography he would never write.
About George Orwell
George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) (1903–1950) wrote fiction, journalism, criticism, and poetry. His nine books include the classics Animal Farm and 1984.
Editorial Review
Born Eric Arthur Blair, Orwell, as these diaries reveal, lived a varied and even dichotomized life. A reader who visited the majority of these pages could never guess that they recorded the activities of the author of Animal Farm, Keep the Aspidistra Flying and 1984, a book he completed while suffering from the tuberculosis that would kill him. (Among the most poignant pages here are Orwell’s lists of his hospital routines just weeks before he died.) Many of the author’s entries deal with his activities on his farm. We learn how many eggs his hens laid each day, his battles with hungry rabbits and deer, his killing of the occasional snake, his observations of the weather, and his maintenance of the property. One moment of great excitement was his near-death in a whirlpool in the Gulf of Corryvreckran. Earlier sections of the diary deal with his abject poverty in the 1930s. He traveled around picking hops (a process he describes in some detail); he was down and out in Paris and London; he traveled to the Mediterranean. In all these places, he noted human customs and flora and fauna. In 1939, Orwell kept daily track of events that were leading toward world war but interwove odd moments about earwigs, a dead cat and the properties of goat manure. In the diary he kept during World War II, he found himself becoming accustomed to continual bombing in London. He joined the Home Guard but noted that their rickety weapons would hardly retard the expected German invasion. – Kirkus Reviews
Garden of Notes by Author of ‘Animal Farm’ - ‘Diaries,’ by George Orwell, Edited by Peter Davison
The New York Times Book Review – August 16, 2012 (Excerpt)
My favorite biographical detail about George Orwell might be that, when he died from tuberculosis in 1950 at the age of 46, his favorite fishing poles were standing in the corner of his London hospital room. He hoped he’d be using them again, and soon.
The Orwell we’ve come to know, through his novels, essays and journalism, is penetrating and witty but also frequently terrifying and remote. In the public imagination he will always be the man who declared: “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”
Among the vivifying things about his “Diaries,” issued now in one volume for the first time, is how they restore some first-person flesh and blood to what can seem like his disembodied head. What’s more, they show Orwell to be nearly Jeffersonian in his combined passion for politics and for the natural world, not merely for fishing but also for the enlightened and fervent cultivation of vegetables, fruit trees, animals and flowers.
If a friend of yours reads these diaries and afterward declares, “My, what an Orwellian garden you have,” do not wrinkle your eyebrows. He or she has paid you a very serious compliment indeed. [Read the full article...]
Patriotism and Poultry - George Orwell’s ‘Diaries’
The New York Times Book Review – August 31, 2012 (Excerpt)
Christopher Hitchens’s introduction to George Orwell’s “Diaries,” among the last things he wrote before his death, is meant as a tribute to one of the writers he most admired, but it can also be taken as a warning. “Read with care, these diaries . . . can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmitted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.” Read with care? What is Hitchens trying to tell us with that phrase? A few sentences later we have: “This diary is not by any means a ‘straight’ guide or a trove of clues and cross-references.” About the creative process that went into constructing one of the novels, Hitchens says Orwell “gives us little or no insight.” Most tellingly, he refers to the entries as “meticulous and occasionally laborious jottings.” Read with care, Hitchens’s introduction alerts Orwell devotees that they should not expect the same pleasures from this book that they get from other of his writings.
This collection contains all 11 of the diaries available to us, along with entries from two of Orwell’s notebooks. Additional diaries may exist. Peter Davison, who has scrupulously prepared these documents and was the lead editor of Orwell’s 20-volume “Complete Works,” says that “it is as certain as things can be that a 12th, and possibly a 13th diary” — seized by authorities during the Spanish Civil War — “are secreted away in the N.K.V.D. Archive in Moscow.” Orwell may also have kept a journal at the start of his professional life in the 1920s, when he was an imperial official in Burma, but that is almost certainly lost. [Read the full article...]
“George Orwell Diaries” edited by Peter Davison
The Washington Post Book Review – September 5, 2012 (Excerpt)
How appropriate that the political moralist George Orwell (1903-50) should be published by a company called Liveright! Orwell, who despised every form of careerism, instinctively gravitated to the kind of quiet rural existence that we associate with ancient Greek philosophers or Anglican clergyman of the 18th century. Certainly, these diaries reveal that the author of “Animal Farm” was happiest cultivating his garden, observing the weather, enjoying the beauty of spring flowers and watching over the health of his hens.
These days, there are many reasons “Why Orwell Matters,” to recall the little book by the late Christopher Hitchens, who introduces “George Orwell Diaries” (and whose name on the cover, in an instance of bad taste, is significantly larger than that of the editor, Peter Davison). Orwell is a saint of journalism, a major satirical novelist, a master of the modern essay. Nonetheless, even the heartiest Orwell aficionado is likely to find these diaries a letdown. Apart from perhaps 100 good pages, they are repetitive, relatively trivial and surprisingly dull. [Read the full article...]
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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss
I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7
The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]
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