George Orwell







George Orwell

author profile


born
June 25, 1903

died
January 21, 1950

gender
male

place of birth
Motihari, Bihar, India

website

genre
Literature & Fiction

influences
W. Somerset Maugham, Trotsky, Dickens, H.G. Wells, Jack London, Huxley, Henry Fielding, Zola, Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, Tom Wintringham, Yevgeny Zamyatin, James Joyce, Upton Sinclair


about this author

Eric Arthur Blair, known by the pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist. Noted as a novelist and critic as well as a political and cultural commentator, Orwell is among the most widely admired English-language essayists of the 20th century. He is best known for two novels critical of totalitarianism in general, and Stalinism in particular: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Both were written and published towards the end of his life.




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avg rating: 3.90 | 284,442 ratings | 11,985 reviews | 167 distinct works | 357 fans
1984 1984
by George Orwell
avg rating 4.03 — 127,488 ratings — published 1949
182 editions
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Animal Farm/1984 Animal Farm/1984
by George Orwell
avg rating 3.95 — 3,613 ratings — published 2003
18 editions
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Down and Out in Paris and Lond... Down and Out in Paris and London
by George Orwell
avg rating 4.02 — 3,128 ratings — published 1933
33 editions
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Homage to Catalonia Homage to Catalonia (Harvest Book)
by George Orwell
avg rating 4.16 — 1,951 ratings — published 1938
32 editions
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Burmese Days Burmese Days
by George Orwell
avg rating 3.75 — 938 ratings — published 1934
22 editions
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Keep the Aspidistra Flying Keep the Aspidistra Flying
by George Orwell
avg rating 3.88 — 765 ratings — published 1999
21 editions
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A Collection of Essays A Collection of Essays
by George Orwell
avg rating 4.29 — 562 ratings — published 1954
4 editions
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The Road to Wigan Pier The Road to Wigan Pier
by George Orwell
avg rating 3.81 — 576 ratings — published 1937
17 editions
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Shooting an Elephant Shooting an Elephant
by George Orwell
avg rating 4.18 — 473 ratings — published 1950
3 editions
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Why I Write Why I Write
by George Orwell
avg rating 4.09 — 443 ratings — published 2004
4 editions
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More books by George Orwell…

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"In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
George Orwell
4 editions
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"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past."
George Orwell (1984)
4 editions
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"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. "
George Orwell
4 editions
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polls

Sometimes the first line of a book just grabs you by the nostrils and drags your fool head into its pages, preventing escape in any way, shape or form. Which of these opening lines has its phalanges most firmly planted in your nasal cavities?

"He— for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it— was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters."

Orlando by Virginia Woolf
 
  28 votes, 2.4%

"He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."

Scaramouche by Raphael Sabatini
 
  39 votes, 3.4%

"Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women."

Middle Passage by Charles Johnson
 
  15 votes, 1.3%

"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon."

The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley
 
  10 votes, 0.9%

“'When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,' Papa would say, 'she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.'”

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
 
  11 votes, 1.0%

"I write this sitting in the kitchen sink."

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
 
  58 votes, 5.1%

"Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden."

The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace
 
  8 votes, 0.7%

"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
 
  40 votes, 3.5%

“'To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die.'”

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
 
  26 votes, 2.3%

"The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up."

The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G.K. Chesterton
 
  13 votes, 1.1%

"Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person."

Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler
 
  19 votes, 1.7%

"I have never begun a novel with more misgiving."

The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
 
  9 votes, 0.8%

"What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings?"

Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things by Gilbert Sorrentino
 
  0 votes, 0.0%

"It was a pleasure to burn."

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
 
  33 votes, 2.9%

"It was the day my grandmother exploded."

The Crow Road by Iain Banks
 
  26 votes, 2.3%

"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis
 
  57 votes, 5.0%

"Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation."

Alphabetical Africa by Walter Abish
 
  9 votes, 0.8%

"For a long time, I went to bed early."

Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
 
  10 votes, 0.9%

"The moment one learns English, complications set in."

Chromos by Felipe Alfau
 
  7 votes, 0.6%

"All this happened, more or less."

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
 
  38 votes, 3.3%

"I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man."

Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
 
  18 votes, 1.6%

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

Neuromancer by William Gibson
 
  30 votes, 2.6%

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show."

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
 
  16 votes, 1.4%

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
 
  46 votes, 4.0%

"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."

Murphy by Samuel Beckett
 
  8 votes, 0.7%

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

1984 by George Orwell
 
  34 votes, 3.0%

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
 
  35 votes, 3.1%

"Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu."

Waiting by Ha Jin
 
  9 votes, 0.8%

"Call me Ishmael."

Moby Dick by Herman Melville
 
  16 votes, 1.4%

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."

The Hobbit: Or There and Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkien
 
  37 votes, 3.2%

"As Gregor Samsa awoke from a night of uneasy dreaming, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
 
  29 votes, 2.5%

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
 
  29 votes, 2.5%

"Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much."

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling
 
  36 votes, 3.1%

"Mother died today."

The Stranger by Albert Camus
 
  15 votes, 1.3%

"When I was three and Bailey was four, we had arrived in the musty little town, wearing tags on our wrists which instructed - 'To Whom It May Concern' - that we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson Jr., from Long Beach, California, en route to Stamps, Arkansas, c/o Mrs. Annie Henderson."

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
 
  3 votes, 0.3%

"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun."

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
 
  40 votes, 3.5%

"There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife."

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
 
  42 votes, 3.7%

"Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing."

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
 
  5 votes, 0.4%

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins."

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
 
  30 votes, 2.6%

"Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme terror."

Herbert West: Reanimator and Other Stories by H.P. Lovecraft
 
  3 votes, 0.3%

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
 
  57 votes, 5.0%

"When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere."

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
 
  12 votes, 1.0%

"All children, except one, grow up."

Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie
 
  34 votes, 3.0%

"My lady and I are being shut up in a tower for seven years"

Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale
 
  4 votes, 0.3%

"'Barabbas came to us by sea', the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy."

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
 
  4 votes, 0.3%

"No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were being scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water."

The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
 
  17 votes, 1.5%

"Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature."

The Debut by Anita Brookner
 
  0 votes, 0.0%

"There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim and we sat in the Korova milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening."

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
 
  13 votes, 1.1%

"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany."

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
 
  28 votes, 2.4%

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

Paul Clifford by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
 
  5 votes, 0.4%

Bah! Foolish poll-maker-person! The nostril seizing power of these paltry lines is minimal, at best! Look to the comments section where I shall carefully type out my choice, which you have so imprudently omitted!
 
  35 votes, 3.1%

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