George Orwell is most widely known today as the novelist who wrote Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), but in the 1930s and 1940s readers of left-wing intellectual periodicals and weeklies knew him as a perceptive and rigorously honest essayist. Indeed, it can be argued that he was essentially a writer of essays who used fiction as a means of presenting an argument, even to the extent of weaving two lengthy essays--the character Goldstein's book and the appendix on "Newspeak"--into Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell's life and career are marked by ambivalences. He hated British imperialism but was enraged by the natives who hindered his administration of it in Burma. In many ways an archetypal Englishman with a love of things English, he was sharply critical of many elements of British life, once calling England "a family with the wrong members in control." A dedicated socialist for all of his...