Eric Blair, better known to us as George Orwell, is one of those writers who is experiencing a renaissance in light of the controversies of the twenty-first century. Our own political and journalistic language take from him and invoke him: “thought-police,” “newspeak,” “Orwellian,” “1984.” Why, though, does Orwell live on and why do we still find him so important, so enduring?
D. J. Taylor gives a new account of Orwell’s life in Orwell: The New Life, one that is informed by the “vast amount of new material that has come to light” since the author’s previous biography in 2003 about one of modern Britain’s greatest writers. There is, as Taylor notes, something deeply “personal” about our attraction to Orwell. He is not a distant writer, an abstract thinker, a hidden intellectual. We feel that he is one of us, someone with whom we can instantly identify and recognize. I knew this was true of myself when I first read Orwell in high school; he happened to be one of the few “great” authors we read in class that I instantly enjoyed.
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