Homage to Catalonia

"When I sit down to write a book," Orwell admitted, "I don’t tell myself, ‘I want to create a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie I must expose, some fact that must be brought to attention…" That is how the four autobiographical essays of Orwell were written, which make up this book.

"Sensible, sensible, we played" is about childhood and school at St. Cyprian’s; Orwell said that he “carried over into the fictional ‘London of 1984’ the sounds, smells, and colors of his schoolboy childhood,” and that “the suffering of students in English schools was an analogy for a person’s helplessness before totalitarian power.”

"Bangs of trouble in Paris and London" is about the underside of life in the backstreets of brilliant Paris, where he worked as a dishwasher at a hotel, and about the world of London tramps and beggars among whom Orwell lived for three years, sleeping under bridges and in shelters for the homeless…

"The Road to Wigan Pier" is about northern England—both poetic and industrial—and about the hardships of miners, the working class, the “oppressed and insulted,” to whose suffering the socialist writer could not remain indifferent.

Finally, "Homage to Catalonia"—perhaps one of his most scorching and honest texts—is about the Spanish Civil War, to which Orwell went to fight as part of the militia.