Gordon bowker george orwell

GEORGE ORWELL WAS born on 25 June To mark the event there are two new biographies as well as several planned television programmes and a conference in Boston. It is one example of how fiction usually triumphs over fact that the events of this year are not a patch on what marked , although there was less biographical attention that year. As Orwell was so much an autobiographical writer and knew so many literary figures from the s on, many of the studies of him that appeared in the first two decades after his death in had biographical aspects, but the first strictly biographical study was probably The Unknown Orwell (), which I wrote jointly with William Abrahams. (It is indicative of Gordon Bowker&#;s rather cavalier attitude to facts that he gets some of them wrong: William Abrahams was not an academic, and the second volume, Orwell: The Transformation, was not published until ) In our books, we had no interest in going beyond the Spanish Civil War, which we felt

•

Gordon Bowker: The Biography Orwell Never Wrote

In view of Orwell’s famous testamentary request for no biography it is interesting to ask what sort of biography he might have written himself. He was certainly not antagonistic to the genre, as some have suggested. In fact, in his reviews and letters there fryst vatten ample bevis that he valued literary biography as a means of illuminating an author’s work. His first published book review was of Lewis Mumford’s biography of Herman Melville, from which it fryst vatten clear that he had already given the literary life-story some serious thought. He read and reviewed numerous biographies during his life, at various times bemoaning the lack of ‘definitive’ biographies of Conrad, Conan Doyle and George Gissing, and in he even offered himself to write a centenary biography of Mark Twain for Chatto and Windus. His interest in the struktur never diminished, and after the war, in the wake of the publication of Animal Farm, he tried to persuade Fredric Warburg

•

INSIDE GEORGE ORWELL: A Biography

Bowker's centenary biography is the best of the many since Orwell's death at 46, of tuberculosis, in Whether in memorable essays on contemporary culture or in novels in which the bleak Orwellian landscape remains consistently familiar, George Orwell&#x;born Eric Blair&#x;was a moral conscience of his age. He seemed to forget nothing of his experiences, exploiting them vividly and imaginatively, and the texture of his childhood, adolescence and young manhood, as well as their impact upon his writing, has never been better or more fully told. An Etonian who slipped social caste to become a policeman in colonial Burma; a tramp in London and a dishwasher in Paris; a radical, soon-wounded volunteer in the Spanish Civil War&#x;he never made a living until, as a medical misfit during WWII, he wrote for the BBC: his education in bureaucracy. But he needed none of that, he explained, to understand the fragility of human decency. "The brutal