Although he became a militant socialist after 1936, he was a fervent anticommunist and persistently attacked the "smelly little orthodoxies" which he felt had corrupted intellectual liberty. While he was committed to the power of the writer to influence and affect the direction of his society and its political order, he was convinced that ideological commitment would destroy the power of a writer: "To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox." He hated expediency (whether political or literary), sympathized with the poor and the underdog, opposed imperialism and aristocratic privilege, and became England's most vigorous spokesman for popular culture during the 1940s. He repeatedly defended the normative values of ordinary, bourgeois life, felt a persistent nostalgia for the order and stability of the pre-1914 world, and believed in the embryonic power within common, ordinary Englishmen. He became, in the words of one writer, a "revolutionary patriot." Orwell's career-as novelist, essayist, and political pamphleteer--finally serves as a kind of barometer to an understanding of the conflicts and mood of the 1930s and 1940s and of the situation of the liberal writer working in a time of cultural and political crisis.
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