Description: This biography of George Orwell restores a sense of drama and passion to Orwell’s life, revealing him as a fascinating, even heroic character struggling to achieve his ambitions against a background of great public and private turmoil. The Cold War helped to make Orwell a successful author by turning him into an anti-Communist icon, but Shelden’s biography renews our appreciation of his place as a great figure in literary, as opposed to political history.

Orwell’s life has to rank as one of the most exciting in literary history. An old Etonian and an officer in the Indian Imperial Police, he was also a dishwasher in a Paris hotel, a hop-picker in Kent, an investigative journalist, a wounded veteran in the Spanish Civil War, a celebrated novelist, and – like Keats and Lawrence before him – a dreamer whose life was cut short by tuberculosis.  The human qualities that make the story of Orwell’s life so appealing dominate this biography – his integrity, his humility and courage, his odd mixture of radical and conservative attitudes, his struggle to balance the public and private sides of his character.  Shelden’s portrait of Orwell is an unusually complicated and subtle one, Orwell thrived on contradiction.

He called himself a Socialist, yet he was always pointing out the weakness in socialism. He devoted enormous efforts to writing his novels, yet admitted near the end of his life, ‘I am not a real novelist anyway’. He was an intellectual who ran a small village shop and referred to himself as a ‘Grocer’; he was an ex-policeman who lived amongst the tramps. In Shelden’s biography, which draws on a wide range of unpublished sources, Orwell is brought vividly to life as a passionate, vital, engaging literary personality, not the cold, distant, political pessimist which he is often portrayed as having been. Meticulously researched and stylishly written, this is undoubtedly one of the most important literary biographies to appear for years.