George Orwell, Now More Than Ever

Everyone knows the adjective Orwellian, which like Kafkaesque is used to describe some of the more frightening and repugnant qualities of contemporary life. And many people have read George Orwell's classic novels 1984 and Animal Farm, mostly in high school.

Those books are great. But Orwell has a special place in my heart as the author of some of the last century's best non-fiction prose--essays, letters, journalism, literary criticism, cultural broadsides, political diaries, and all kinds of other writings that make it clear that Orwell would have been the world's greatest blogger if the Internet had been invented in 1930.

(As an aside, isn't it interesting to contemplate how the world might have been different if the Internet had been invented in 1930? How would the global struggles against fascism and Communism have been affected? What if the Jews of Europe had been in constant daily contact with the rest of the world via email and websites? Maybe nothing would have turned out differently, but then again . . . Any alternative history writer looking for a new idea is free to run with this one.)

I find myself frequently dipping into the enormous four-volume collection of Orwell's collected essays, journalism, and letters (edited by his wife Sonia and Ian Angus and published in paperback by David R. Godine). I love to reread his bracing commentary on the events of the day, in which he can be counted on to expertly expose and skewer the cant and hypocrisy of all sides, from the far right (of course) to the far left, which then included Stalinists, Trotskyites, and many other now-defunct variations. And he does it with such humor, astringent wit, and stylistic grace that every page is a sheer pleasure to read, even when the controversies under discussion are mostly passe.

If you're not acquainted with this wonderful stuff, start with the widely-available anthology titled A Collection of Essays, which gathers a lot of Orwell's most permanently interesting work. It includes pieces on everything from Orwell's miserable boyhood as a scholarship student at a third-tier "public" (i.e., private) school in England to brilliantly insightful essays on the political and social implications of bawdy comic postcards, kids' school stories, hard-boiled pulp fiction, and the novels of Dickens. The observations are often surprising and mostly dead on target, and the writing is tremendously fun in a delightfully accessible, pop-intellectual sort of way.

Orwell is one of the two deceased writers (the other is I. F. Stone) that I most wish could somehow be cloned to write about today's political, social, and cultural scene.