George Orwell's essay "The Prevention of Literature" deals with attacks on free speech and intellectual liberty, and the danger of totalitarianism for the writer. The main points are as follows.

Intellectual freedom is under attack both from the totalitarian left, which is ideologically opposed to it, and in a more practical but less tangible sense from "monopoly and bureaucracy," which encourage conformity.

Those who attack intellectual freedom do not generally speak about truth and falsehood, but condemn the writers and thinkers they dislike with words like "individualist," "escapist," and "romantic."

The main enemies of intellectual freedom used to be Conservatives, Catholics, and Fascists. Now (in 1946), totalitarian Communists also pose a threat. The most immediate enemies of liberty and truth are still "the press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats." However, writers and intellectuals themselves also seem to care about freedom less than they used to.

A truly totalitarian society means the end of literature. Although great writing has been produced under despotic regimes in the past, these societies were not technologically advanced enough to be totalitarian.

These observations apply to prose writing of all kinds, from journalism to imaginative literature. Good verse (though not the very best) might still be produced under a totalitarian regime.

Orwell ends by saying that other arts, such as music, painting, and architecture, together with the sciences, may survive under a totalitarian regime, but serious literature is doomed, and any writer who cooperates with totalitarianism is collaborating in his own destruction.