His biographer, Bernard Crick in George Orwell: A Life, dismisses the notion that “Such, Such, Were the Joys” was written just before Orwell began Nineteen Eighty-Four and reflected the tuberculosis that was ravaging him at the time. It has been argued by some Orwell scholars that his unhappy experiences at school influenced his conception of the grim future in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is also the longest essay Orwell wrote. A Collection of Essays was one of the first and most successful of the Anchor Books series which Epstein started and it remains in print and continues to sell today.Ī Collection of Essays consists of fourteen pieces, of which the lead essay, the twenty-thousand word “Such, Such Were the Joys” about Orwell’s traumatic schooldays, could only be published in the United States because of English libel laws.

It was compiled from previously published material culled from both Inside the Whale and Critical Essays, plus an unpublished piece, a remarkable, often unforgettable portrait of his early school days, “Such, Such Were the Joys.” This volume was the work of the young publishing genius Jason Epstein, who had convinced Doubleday that there was a market among upscale readers and college students for quality paperbacks. In 1952, two years after his death, with Orwell’s popularity growing due to the success of Nineteen Eighty-Four, a new version of his best non-fiction was published in America under the title A Collection of Essays. Orwell said he enjoyed analyzing literary figures but there was no money in it. For Inside the Whale his advance from his publisher, Victor Gollancz, was just thirty pounds. Unfortunately for Orwell, writing essays was not financially profitable. Leavis asserted that it showed that Orwell was one of the best prose stylists then writing in English. Inside the Whale was quickly forgotten, although the distinguished literary critic Q. An earlier anthology, Inside the Whale, appeared in the early days of World War II but got lost in the dramatic events of the spring of 1940 when Hitler’s legions swept across Western Europe. Called Critical Essays in England, it was renamed Dickens, Dali, and Others when it appeared in the United States. Sixty years ago, at the height of his fame as the author of Animal Farm, Orwell published a collection of essays that first revealed to a wide audience his skill in this most difficult of literary forms. George Orwell was the greatest essayist of the twentieth century.

Orwell a collection of essays