All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays »

GEORGE ORWELL (1903-1950) was born in India and served with the Imperial Police in Burma before joining the Republican Army in the Spanish Civil War. Orwell was the author of six novels as well as numerous essays and nonfiction works.

GEORGE PACKER is a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq and other works. He lives in Brooklyn. Keith Gessen was born in Russia and educated at Harvard. He is a founding editor of n+1 and has written about literature and culture for Dissent, the Nation, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books. He is the author of the novel All the Sad Young Literary Men.

As a critic, George Orwell cast a wide net. Equally at home discussing Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin, he moved back and forth across the porous borders between essay and journalism, high art and low. A frequent commentator on literature, language, film, and drama throughout his career, Orwell turned increasingly to the critical essay in the 1940s, when his most important experiences were behind him and some of his most incisive writing lay ahead.

All Art Is Propaganda follows Orwell as he demonstrates in piece after piece how intent analysis of a work or body of work gives rise to trenchant aesthetic and philosophical commentary. With masterpieces such as "Politics and the English Language" and "Rudyard Kipling" and gems such as "Good Bad Books," here is an unrivaled education in, as George Packer puts it, "how to be interesting, line after line."

The Barnes & Noble Review

The English language has played a cruel joke on George Orwell's reputation. It takes the form of an adjective, "Orwellian," that is (alas) all too useful in describing certain tendencies in political life. But the word's durability and lasting popularity has a perverse effect: it conveys precisely the opposite of Orwell's own sensibility or his qualities as an author.

contents

Foreword by George Packer • ix

Introduction by Keith Gessen • xvii

Charles Dickens • 1

Boys’ Weeklies • 63

Inside the Whale • 95

Drama Reviews: The Tempest, The Peaceful Inn • 141

Film Review: The Great Dictator • 144

Wells, Hitler and the World State • 148

The Art of Donald McGill • 156

No, Not One • 169

Rudyard Kipling • 177

T. S. Eliot • 194

Can Socialists Be Happy? • 202

Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali • 210

Propaganda and Demotic Speech • 223

Raffles and Miss Blandish • 232

Good Bad Books • 248

The Prevention of Literature • 253

Politics and the English Language • 270

Confessions of a Book Reviewer • 287

Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels • 292

Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool • 316

Writers and Leviathan • 337

Review of The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene • 346

Reflections on Gandhi • 352

Notes • 363

GEORGE ORWELL (1903–1950) served with the Imperial Police in Burma, fought with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, and was a member of the Home Guard and a writer for the BBC during World War II. He is the author of many works of nonfiction and fiction.

GEORGE PACKER is a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq and other works. He lives in Brooklyn.

Keith Gessen was born in Russia and educated at Harvard. He is a founding editor of n+1 and has written about literature and culture for Dissent, the Nation, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books. He is the author of the novel All the Sad Young Literary Men.