Orwell’s writing career spanned nearly seventeen years. Ironically, although Orwell didn’t consider himself a novelist, he wrote two of the most important literary masterpieces of the 20th century: Animal Farm and 1984. While these are the most famous novels of his career, his memoirs, other novels, and essential work as an essayist all contribute to the body of work that makes up important twentieth century literature.
In Orwell’s writing, he sought truth. Even his fiction has elements of the world around him, of the wars and struggles that he witnessed, of the terrible nature of politics, and the terrible toll that totalitarianism takes on the human spirit. From the time he began to write at the age of twenty-four, Orwell longed to capture the struggles of “real” people, to live among the less fortunate, and to tell their stories. Of his own writing, Orwell has said that he writes because there is some kind of lie that he has to expose, some fact to which he wants to draw attention. Orwell certainly does this in 1984, a novel fraught with political purpose, meaning, and warning.
