George Orwell - The complete novels of George Orwell

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Animal Farm first published in Great Britain by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd 1945

Published in Penguin Books 1951

Copyright 1945 by Eric Blair

Burmese Days first published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz 1935

Published in Penguin Books 1944

This edition published by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd 1949

Published in Penguin Books 1967

Copyright 1934 by Eric Blair

A Clergymans Daughter first published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz 1935

Published by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd 1960

Published in Penguin Books 1964

Copyright 1935 by Eric Blair

Coming up for Air first published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz 1939

Published by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd 1954

Published in Penguin Books 1962

Copyright 1939 by Eric Blair

Keep the Aspidistra Flying first published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz 1936

Published by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd 1954

Published in Penguin Books 1962

Copyright 1936 by Eric Blair

Nineteen Eighty-four first published in Great Britain by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd 1949

Published in Penguin Books 1954

Copyright 1949 by Eric Blair

This edition first published by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd in association with Octopus Books Ltd 1976

Published in Penguin Books 1983

Reprinted in Penguin Classics 2000

Copyright The Estate of Eric Blair, 1976, 1983
All rights reserved

Readers should note that the authoritative texts of these and other works by Orwell, as published in

Martin Secker & Warburg Ltds Complete Works of George Orwell series, are available in

single-volume editions in Penguin

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers
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which it is published and without a similar condition including this
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ISBN: 9780141911656

The novels of George Orwell, like his great essays, reflect, as in a mirror, constantly crystal-clear and frequently sharp with menace, the extensive changes of outlook and the shifts of values in British and indeed much of human society in the first half of the twentieth century.

Orwell was born Eric Blair in 1903 in an India that still seemed firmly fixed in an immutable Empire on which the sun never set. He attended Eton, his first publication was a patriotic poem printed by a provincial newspaper during the 191418 war, and in 1922 he joined the Indian Imperial Police and served in Burma for the next five years. On leave to England in 1927 he decided not to return to the Far East and resigned. From that time his life, until then seemingly cast in an upper middle-class mould and pointing towards a conventional career in Imperial service, took an entirely fresh course. Determined to become a writer, he lived in a succession of mean rooms on next to nothing in London and Paris, and it was in the latter city that his first article as a professional writer was published. He worked there as a kitchen porter in a luxury hotel and tramped and picked hops in Kent, later both conjured up so vividly in Down and Out in Paris and London. During this time, 193033, Orwell picked up a meagre living as well as he could, whether by reviewing or teaching, and he continued to write Burmese Days, completing it before going down with a bout of recurrent pneumonia. When the book came out in the U.S.A. (as no English publisher had bought it) Orwell had taken a job as a part-time assistant in a London bookshop. Burmese Days eventually appeared in England, a few months after A Clergymans Daughter came out in 1935. Early in the following year Orwell was reviewing fiction for the New English Weekly and was also gathering material for a book on the depressed areas of the industrial North of England, The Road to Wigan Pier.

When the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, Orwell foresaw the importance of its outcome to the future of Europe and before the year ended he had enlisted in Barcelona. While in the front line as a Republican militiaman with the P.O.U.M., the anarchists and the Trotskyites, he was shot in the throat by a sniper. He survived and returned to England to write one of the most forthright and fearless books on the Spanish struggle, Homage to Catalonia, which came out in April 1938, one of the first books to denounce the Communists for exploiting the struggle for their own ends. He was repeatedly rejected on medical grounds when he tried to enlist in the British Army in 1939 on the outbreak of war. He subsequently served in the Home Guard, worked in the B.B.C. and became Literary Editor of