Orwell: The New Life

Novelist and book critic Taylor (On 1984) delivers a sterling account of the life and works of George Orwell (1903–1950). Born Eric Blair in Motihari, India, Orwell moved with his family to Oxfordshire, England, while he was an infant. Following his schooling, he worked as a policeman in Burma before returning to England, where he began his career as a writer and adapted his pseudonym from Suffolk’s River Orwell. Taylor digs into the creation of Orwell’s most celebrated works, noting the acclaim that followed the 1945 publication of his Stalinism allegory, Animal Farm, despite having been rejected by multiple publishers because of the novel’s criticism of the Soviet Union while the country was fighting alongside the U.K. in WWII. Orwell furthered his critique of totalitarianism in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he wrote while battling tuberculosis. He died from the disease at age 46, a year after the novel’s publication. Taylor doesn’t elide the less savory aspects of the author’s character, noting that Orwell’s “dislike of homosexuals follows him through his work like the clang of a medieval leper bell,” and the meticulous research illuminates how Orwell’s political commitments informed his fiction. This stands out in the crowded field of Orwell biographies. (May)