Americans still read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, 75 years after it was first published on June 8, 1949. At the time, the year 1984 was far in the future; now it’s 40 years in the past. Yet our present feels more than ever like Orwell’s dystopia.
The novel is set on Airstrip One, a totalitarian version of what is today Britain. Its protagonist is Winston Smith, a censor working in the Ministry of Truth. His job is to alter historical records to conform to whatever the ruling party now decrees. He rewrites history and the very documents on which historians rely.
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