It wasn't until his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) were published that he became known in the United States. George Orwell didn't become well-known as a writer, nor financially successful, until the final five years of his short life. He’s also an inspirational hero of mine for the ways he used his writing to advocate for social justice. I've read his essays over and over, and have always found them to be exemplars of great substance combined with unrivaled prose style. The great English author George Orwell shared that formative loneliness: "I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories, and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued," Orwell wrote in his great 1946 essay "Why I Write." He’d go on to be among the most influential writers of the 20th Century, and he remains influential today.īefore I go any further, I want to make a personal admission, which is that George Orwell has been my favorite writer, the one who's had the most sustained influence on my development as a writer, for the last three decades. The impulse to tell stories, and creating stories to keep ourselves company, is what writing is largely about, aside from the craft itself. So many writers, myself included, share a formative experience of loneliness that turned into a fascination with storytelling. If you’re interested in sharing your expertise, your story, or some advice you think will help a fellow freelancer out, feel free to send your blog post to us here. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre.This is a post from a member of the Freelancers Union community. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. The first eight books in the series are: Why I Write While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism.
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