Orwell: The Authorized Biography

by Michael Shelden

Book Overview

[This is the Audiobook CASSETTE Library Edition in vinyl case.][Read by Frederick Davidson] *A 1992 Pulitzer Prize Finalist *A New York Times Notable Book for 1991 In his probing and revelatory... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060167092
• ISBN13: 9780060167097
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Length: 497 Pages
• Weight: 2.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.7" x 6.5" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Commendable -- recommendable -- but not quite ideal

George Orwell has become one of the literary icons of the 20th Century and, ironically, someone around whom a cult of personality has developed. I say "ironically" because like Franz Kafka -- and unlike, say, Ernest Hemingway or Rainer Maria Rilke or Jean-Paul Sartre (to name the three who first leap to mind) -- Orwell would not have embraced that development. He was too private . . . and too honest and decent. I don't know whether that makes the biographer's task more difficult in the case of Orwell, but for some reason I feel that the obligations of reliability and responsibility are greater for Orwell's biographer than for Hemingway's -- probably because truth is more important for Orwell. In the case of Michael Shelden and ORWELL: THE AUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY those obligations become a tad more onerous because the biography is authorized by Orwell's literary executor. I have read a lot by Orwell, but this is the first biography of him that I have read, and I come away feeling that Shelden has commendably discharged the obligations of reliability and responsibility. Unlike some authorized biographies, Shelden's does not seem to be an exercise in hagiography. To be sure, Shelden clearly admires Orwell. In many respects, of course, that admiration is justified. Orwell's cult persona is that of an eccentric saint, and while Shelden may downplay somewhat Orwell's eccentricities (which still take a distant back seat to those of Kafka), he provides plenty of support for Orwell's saintliness, at least among the pantheon of 20th-Century literary giants. The most obvious and commendable of those "saintly" qualities was Orwell's instinctual habit of backing his liberal political/social beliefs with action, as, for example, living among the "down and out" and voluntarily risking his life as a front-line soldier against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War. In addition, Shelden's biography highlights two other senses in which Orwell deserves respect and admiration. He was a socialist in the relatively non-political sense that he was an advocate of the dignity of the individual regardless of social class. And he was an independent thinker, little influenced by cant and ever-vigilant for hypocrisy. Here are several miscellaneous points that registered with me while reading this biography. One: Orwell's ambivalence towards success -- which contributed to his adopting, in 1933, a literary pseudonym (his real name being Eric Arthur Blair). Two: The extent to which English life during Orwell's time was permeated by various degrees of censorship, both public and private, and, similarly, the stultifying effect of Britain's libel laws, which necessitated revisions or watering down of most of Orwell's published works pre-WWII. Three: Orwell's admiration for Joyce's "Ulysses" (so different in style from Orwell's own work), particularly because it focused on "the life of the ordinary man in the street" and "the mind of a common man like Leopold Bloom."

Brilliant biography of a literary giant

Professor Shelden's biography of Orwell is outstanding and well-researched. Prof. Shelden provides the important details of the molding of Eric Blair- boyhood, school, service in Burma for the Empire- and explains how each experience influenced young Blair yet he doesn't try to feed the reader psychobabble hogwash. Orwell's fitful rise as a writer is especially interesting. Prof. Shelden explains Orwell's various ideological wars and paints a portrait of a non-doctrinaire, humanist socialist who was a more astute critic of Stalinism or ideological socialism than anyone to his right. What I found refreshing about Prof. Shelden's account is that the reader finishes the bio without really knowing the writer's own politics. He allows Orwell to speak for himself.