It’s oddly comforting to know that even back in the early 1900s, people were complaining about politics and politicians the same way that we are today. This topic may seem pretty uninteresting and a product of its time at first glance, however, Orwell makes the connection between the decline in language to the decline in political transparency. He cites the use of dying metaphors, operators (padding out sentences with extra syllables or taking simple verbs and extending them into phrases), pretentious diction, and meaningless words as the culprits for this downfall. In this essay Orwell writes what is, essentially, a rant about the decline of modern English. Take for example his essay ‘Politics and the English Language’. The themes discussed in his essays are just as relevant to modern society as any of his books and are much more diverse than the themes of totalitarianism and censorship that feature hugely in his novels.

His essays range from discussing watching a man be hanged, to his thoughts on the common toad, to a defense of English cooking. He is without a doubt an even better essayist than he is a novelist. When you look around at our modern world and understand what it is like in Russia or especially China, it doesn’t take a professor of literature to dissect why Orwell’s novels are still relevant in our current climate.Īfter reading his collection of essays, Shooting an Elephant, I cannot understand why Orwell is most famous for his novels.

His novels Animal Farm and 1984 explore these subjects in great detail, with the deft and nuance of a writer who personally fought against some of these evils during the Spanish Civil War. Orwell gained his fame through his outspoken stance on topics such as the evils of fascism, communism, totalitarianism, and government censorship. His novels such as Animal Farm and 1984 have been cited countless times over the past 80 years and you need only read them to see why. George Orwell is without a doubt one of the most influential writers of the 20 th century.

Essays by george orwell