Criticism > Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism > Special Commissioned Entry on George Orwell, W. Scott Lucas - Orwell's Era

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ORWELL'S ERA

POLITICS

To evaluate the work of Orwell, one must consider him primarily as a political writer. As he noted in his 1946 essay “Why I Write,” “What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art.”¹ His writing cannot be separated from the ideology of his society and time. However valiantly his admirers might try to portray him as a writer who showed principled opposition to the faults of his own country as well as those of others, Orwell's writing reveals the signs of his upbringing and experiences working for the “establishment,” and his beliefs ultimately led him to defend the political system that he was supposedly criticizing. The final irony is that, by the end of his life, the author who portrayed the individual confronting the tyrannical state in Nineteen Eighty-four was passing information, listing individuals (including friends) who held suspect beliefs, to...

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1. Introduction
2. About George Orwell
3. Orwell At Work
4. Orwell's Era
5. Orwell's Works
6. Orwell On Orwell And Writing
7. Orwell As Studied
8. Copyright

1. George Orwell