Orwell in Spain

Here, for the first time in one volume, are George Orwell's complete writings on the Spanish Civil War, an experience which had a profound effect on his life and work.
Homage to Catalonia, his passionate memoir of fighting in the war, captures the revolutionary fervour and high hopes of joining up in Barcelona, the fear and chaos of the front, and the bullet wound and bitter betrayal that nearly cost him his life. The powerful journalism, essays letters and pamphlets also collected here show his resolution to tell the truth about the war amid a 'crop of lies' from both the Communist Party and the British press. In 'Looking Back on the Spanish War' he recalls his desperate disillusionment, but also remembers the heroism and decency of the ordinary people he encountered.

Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) was born in 1903 in India, where his father worked for the Civil Service. The family moved to England in 1907 and in 1917 Orwell entered Eton, where he contributed regularly to the various college magazines. From 1922 to 1927 he served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that inspired his first novel, Burmese Days (1934). Several years of poverty followed. He lived in Paris for two years before returning to England, where he worked successively as a private tutor, schoolteacher and bookshop assistant, and contributed reviews and articles to a number of periodicals. Down and Out in Paris and London was published in 1933. In 1936 he was commissioned by Victor Gollancz to visit areas of mass unemployment in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is a powerful description of the poverty he saw there. At the end of 1936 Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Republicans and was wounded. Homage to Catalonia is his account of the civil war. He was admitted to a sanatorium in 1938 and from then on was never fully fit. He spent six months in Morocco and there wrote Coming Up for Air. During the Second World War he served in the Home Guard and worked for the BBC Eastern Service from 1941 to 1943. As literary editor of the Tribune he contributed a regular page of political and literary commentary, and he also wrote for the Observer and later for the Manchester Evening News. His unique political allegory, Animal Farm was published in 1945, and it was this novel, together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which brought him world-wide fame. George Orwell died in London in January 1950.