At the age of 30, with the publication of his first book (Down and
Out in Paris and London) Eric Blair, the "upper-lower-middle class"
Old Boy became the writer George Orwell, a passionate egalitarian,
idiosyncratic socialist and remorseless dissector of the covert
injuries of class. In this superb biography of Blair, Stanksy and
Abrahams undertake the extended search for the sources of his alter
ego, the literary personality into whom Blair projected the long
deferred resentments of the sensitive scholarship boy, the
diffident Etonian, and the Kiplingesque police officer staunchly
shouldering the imperial burden of his caste. "Orwell was his way
of making himself into a writer, at which he brilliantly succeeded
and of unmaking himself as a gentleman" by opting out of the
gentility to which he was born and bred. Tracing Orwell backwards
to Blair, the authors chip away at the formative years which
Orwell, for the rest of his life, so deliberately obscured and
selectively misrepresented. Step by step they proceed with the
reconstruction of the schoolboy miseries inflicted at St. Cyprian's
which years later generated the devastating and unforgiving essay
of English public school life Such, Such Were The Joys, the Burmese
days when Blair lived as a sahib but internalized the experience of
the victim, and the later compulsion to expiate the burden of class
by going "down and out" to immerse himself in the squalor and smell
of poverty - "the experience he had been taught since childhood to
fear most." Outdistancing by far all previous attempts to penetrate
the Orwellian reticence, Stansky and Abrahams (their Journey to the
Frontier won a National Book award in 1967) have accomplished the
feat of integrating Blair with his carefully controlled creation
Orwell, producing a wholly convincing study of the psychological
distancing that converts disaffection into art. (Kirkus Reviews)
For the first time, these two essential books on George Orwell have
been brought together under one cover. "The Unknown Orwell
describes the first thirty years of Orwell's life--his
childhood, the years at Eton and in Burma, and the struggles to
become a writer. "Orwell: The Transformation
carries us forward into the crucial years 1933 to 1937 in which
Eric Blair, minor novelist, became George Orwell, a powerful writer
with a view, a mission, and a message.
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