George Orwell bibliography

George Orwell bibliography

Orwell pictured by the National Union of Journalists in 1933
Releases
↙Books	3
↙Novels	6
↙Articles	369
↙Stories	5
↙Collections	29
↙Pamphlets	7
↙Poems	17
↙Plays	1
↙Scripts	4
↙Journals	4
↙Letters	4
↙Books edited	2
↙Periodicals edited	1
↙Newspapers edited	2
↙Complete works	454
References and footnotes

The following George Orwell bibliography is a list of articles, essays, and books written by the British writer George Orwell (1903–1950). Orwell was a prolific writer and The Economist considered him "perhaps the 20th century's best chronicler of English culture".^[1]

Books and novels

Orwell is probably best remembered for his novels. His final two in particular—Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four—sold over 40 million copies in 65 languages by 1989; more than any other pair of books by a single author.^[2] Several of his works were semi-autobiographical in nature: Burmese Days was inspired by his period working as an imperial policeman and is the most fictionalized; Down and Out in Paris and London records his experiences tramping and teaching in those two cities; The Road to Wigan Pier is initially a study of poverty in the north of England, but ends with an extended biographical essay of Orwell's experiences with poverty; and Homage to Catalonia recounts his experiences volunteering to fight fascism in anarchist Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War with the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification.

• Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
• Burmese Days (1934)
• A Clergyman's Daughter (1935)
• Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)
• The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)
• Homage to Catalonia (1938)
• Coming Up for Air (1939)
• Animal Farm (1945)
• Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

Essays

Orwell wrote hundreds of essays, book reviews, and editorials during his lifetime. His insights into linguistics, literature, and politics—in particular anti-fascism, anti-communism, and democratic socialism—have continued to be influential decades after his death.^[3] Several of these were collected during his life—Inside the Whale and Other Essays by his original publisher Victor Gollancz Ltd in 1940, and Critical Essays by Secker and Warburg in 1946. The latter press also published the collections Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays in 1950 and England Your England and Other Essays in 1953.

Since his death, many collections of essays have appeared, with the first attempt at a comprehensive collection being the four-volume Collected Essays, Letters and Journalism of George Orwell edited by Ian Angus and Sonia Brownell, which was published by Secker and Warburg and Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich in 1968–1970. Peter Davison of De Montfort University spent 17 years researching and correcting the entirety of Orwell's works^[4] with Angus and Stella Davison and devoted the last eleven volumes of the twenty-volume series The Complete Works of George Orwell to essays, letters, and journal entries. The entire series was initially printed by Secker and Warburg in 1986, finished by Random House in 1998, and revised in 2000–2002.

Notable essays include:

• "A Hanging" (1931) and "Shooting an Elephant" (1936), recounting Orwell's time in Burma
• "As I Please", a series in the Tribune (December 1943 – April 1947)
• "The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius" and "England Your England" (1941), on the essence of English culture
• "London Letters", a series in the Partisan Review (1941–1946)
• "My Country Right or Left" (1940), an investigation of patriotism
• "Politics and the English Language"(1946), a critique of political language and poor journalism
• "Such, Such Were the Joys" (possibly written c. 1947, published posthumously in 1952), criticizing Orwell's experiences as a schoolboy at St Cyprian's School
• "Why I Write" (1946), on being an author

Pamphlets

Starting with The Lion and the Unicorn, several of his longer essays took the form of pamphlets and were published and distributed independently.

• The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius was printed by his publisher Secker and Warburg as Searchlight Books No. 1 on 19 February 1941
• Betrayal of the Left was printed by his other regular publisher Victor Gollancz Ltd. in 1941, with material from Victor Gollancz, John Strachey, and others.
• Victory or Vested Interest? came from The Labour Book Service on 15 May 1942, with Orwell's "Culture and Democracy" (made up of the pieces "Fascism and Democracy" and "Patriots and Revolutionaries") amongst others.
• Talking to India, by E. M. Forster, Richie Calder, Cedric Dover, Hsiao Ch'ien and Others: A Selection of English Language Broadcasts to India was published in 1943 by Allen & Unwin, edited with an introduction by Orwell
• James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution – Socialist Book Centre, printing of Second Thoughts on James Burnham under this title in July 1946.
• The English People was printed by HarperCollins 1947.
• British Pamphleteers Volume 1: From the 16th Century the 18th Century from Allan Wingate, spring 1948 was co-edited by Orwell and Reginald Reynolds with an introduction by Orwell.

Poems

While Orwell was not known for his poetry, he did compose several verses which have survived, including many written during his school days:^[5]

• "Awake! Young Men of England" (1914)
• "Ballade" (1929)
• "A Dressed Man and a Naked Man" (1933)
• "A Happy Vicar I Might Have Been" (1935)
• "Ironic Poem About Prostitution" (written prior to 1936)
• "Kitchener" (1916)
• "The Lesser Evil" (1924)
• "A Little Poem" (1935)
• "On a Ruined Farm Near the His Master's Voice Gramophone Factory" (1934)
• "Our Minds Are Married, but We Are Too Young" (1918)
• "The Pagan" (1918)
• "Poem from Burma" (1922–1927)
• "Romance" (1925)
• "Sometimes in the Middle Autumn Days" (1933)
• "Suggested by a Toothpaste Advertisement" (1918–1919)
• "Summer-like for an Instant" (1933)
• "As One Non-Combatant to Another" (1943)

Editing

In addition to the pamphlets British Pamphleteers Volume 1: From the 16th Century the 18th Century and Talking to India, by E. M. Forster, Richie Calder, Cedric Dover, Hsiao Ch'ien and Others: A Selection of English Language Broadcasts to India, Orwell edited two newspapers during his Eton years—College Days/The Colleger (1917) and Election Times (1917–1921). While working for the BBC, he collected six editions of a poetry magazine named Voice which were broadcast by Orwell, Mulk Raj Anand, John Atkins, Edmund Blunden, Venu Chitale, William Empson, Vida Hope, Godfrey Kenton, Una Marson, Herbert Read, and Stephen Spender. The magazine was published and distributed to the readers before being broadcast by the BBC. Issue five has not been recovered.

Collected editions

The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (CEJL) is divided into four volumes:

• An Age Like This 1920–1940
• My Country Right or Left 1940–1943
• As I Please, 1943–1945
• In Front of Your Nose, 1945–1950

The Complete Works of George Orwell (TCW) is a twenty-volume series, with the first nine being devoted to the books and novels and the final eleven volumes entitled:

• A Kind of Compulsion: 1903–1936
• Facing Unpleasant Facts: 1937–1939
• A Patriot After All: 1940–1941
• All Propaganda Is Lies: 1941–1942
• Keeping Our Little Corner Clean: 1942–1943
• Two Wasted Years: 1943
• I Have Tried to Tell the Truth: 1943–1944
• I Belong to the Left: 1945
• Smothered Under Journalism: 1946
• It Is What I Think: 1947–1948
• Our Job Is to Make Life Worth Living: 1949–1950

The initial publication from 1986 includes the following volumes, which would be incorporated into the latter printing, as well as an authorized biography:

• An Age Like This: 1920–1940
• My Country, Right or Left: 1940–1943
• As I Please: 1943–1945
• In Front of Your Nose: 1945–1950

Davison later compiled a handful of writings—including letters, an obituary for H. G. Wells, and his reconstruction of Orwell's list—into Lost Orwell: Being a Supplement to The Complete Works of George Orwell (LO), which was published by Timewell Press in 2006, with a paperback published on 25 September 2007 (ISBN 1857252144).

Only two essay collections were published during Orwell's lifetime—Inside the Whale and Other Essays (ItW) in 1940 and Critical Essays (CrE) in 1946 (the latter published in the United States as Dickens, Dali, and Others in 1958.) His publisher followed up these anthologies with Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (SaE) in 1950, England Your England and Other Essays (EYE) in 1953—which was revised as Such, Such Were the Joys (SSWtJ)—and Collected Essays (ColE) in 1961. The first significant publications in the United States were Doubleday's A Collection of Essays by George Orwell (CoE) from 1954, 1956's The Orwell Reader, Fiction, Essays, and Reportage (OR) from Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, and Penguin's Selected Essays (SE) in 1957; re-released in 1962 with the title Inside the Whale and Other Essays (ISBN 0140011854) and in abridged form as Why I Write (WIW, ISBN 0143036351) in 2005 as a part of the Great Ideas series. In the aforementioned series, Penguin also published the short collections Books v. Cigarettes (ISBN 0141036613), and Decline of the English Murder (ISBN 0141191260). The later does not contain the same texts as Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays (DotEM), published by Penguin in association with Secker & Warburg in 1965.

In 1976 Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd in association with Octopus Books published The Complete Novels (CN), this edition was latter republished by Penguin Books in 1983, and reprinted in Penguin Classics 2000 (ISBN 978-0-141-18515-6) . Since the publication of Davison's corrected critical edition, John Carey's thorough Essays (EL) was released on 15 October 2002 as a part of the Everyman's Library (ISBN 0-375-41503-3) and George Packer edited two collections for Houghton Mifflin, released on 13 October 2008—All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays (AAIP, ISBN 0151013551) and Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays (FUF, ISBN 0151013616).

Other works

After his first publication—the poem "Awake! Young Men of England", published in Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard in 1914—Orwell continued to write for his school publications The Election Times and College Days/The Colleger.^[6] He also experimented with writing for several years before he could support himself as an author. Some of these pieces include first-hand journalism (e.g. 1931's The Spike), articles (e.g. 1931's Hop-Picking),^[7] and even a one-act play.^[8] (He would also adapt four plays as a radio dramas.)

His fiction production was not as prolific—he wrote a few short stories which were unpublished and claimed to have written two entire novels in French while living in Paris,^[9] but burned the manuscripts (Orwell routinely destroyed his manuscripts and with the exception of a partial copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four, they are lost.)^[10] In addition, Orwell produced several pieces while working at the BBC as a correspondent. Some of these were composed by him and others were merely recited for radio broadcast. For several years, these went uncollected until the anthologies Orwell: The War Broadcasts (WB) (Marboro Books, June 1985 – ISBN 9999723306 in the United States, Orwell: The Lost Writings Arbor House, September 1985 – ISBN 0877957452) and Orwell: The War Commentaries (WC) (Gerald Duckworth & Company Ltd., London, 1 January 1985) were edited by W. J. West. Orwell was responsible for producing The Indian Section of BBC Eastern Service and his program notes from 1 February and 7 December 1942, have survived (they are reproduced in War Broadcasts.) He was also asked to provide an essay about British cooking along with recipes for The British Council.^[11] As mentioned above, Orwell kept a diary which has been published by his widow and academic Peter Davison, in addition to his private correspondence.

Full list of publications

References

External links

• Several works presented by the Orwell Prize

v • d • e Works of George Orwell Novels Burmese Days (1934) · A Clergyman's Daughter (1935) · Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) · Coming Up for Air (1939) · Animal Farm (1945) · Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) Nonfiction Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) · The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) · Homage to Catalonia (1938) Essays "A Hanging" (1931) · "The Spike" (1931) · "Bookshop Memories" (1936) · "Shooting an Elephant" (1936) · "Charles Dickens" (1939) · "Boys' Weeklies" (1940) · "Inside the Whale" (1940) · "My Country Right or Left" (1940) · "England Your England" (1941) · "The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius" (1941) · "Poetry and the Microphone" (1943) · "Notes on Nationalism" (1945) · "Books v. Cigarettes" (1946) · "Confessions of a Book Reviewer" (1946) · "Decline of the English Murder" (1946) · "A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray" (1946) · "How the Poor Die" (1946) · "The Moon Under Water" (1946) · "A Nice Cup of Tea" (1946) · "Pleasure Spots" (1946) · "Politics and the English Language" (1946) · "The Politics of Starvation" (1946) · "Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels" (1946) · "The Prevention of Literature" (1946) · "Riding Down from Bangor" (1946) · Second Thoughts on James Burnham (1946) · "Some Thoughts on the Common Toad" (1946) · "Why I Write" (1946) · "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool" (1947) · "Such, Such Were the Joys" (1947) Related articles "As I Please" · "London Letters" · Betrayal of the Left · Inside the Whale and Other Essays · Searchlight Books · Secker and Warburg · Victor Gollancz Ltd · Eileen O'Shaughnessy · Sonia Brownell · Orwell's list · Eric & Us · Why Orwell Matters · Orwell Award · Orwell Prize · Orwellian Texts · Quotes · Images